The biodiversity cluster aims to measure the composition of organisms and their exchange between environmental compartments of changing fjord ecosystems, considering ocean, land, ice and atmosphere. We will relate eDNA seasonal compositional dynamics measured within each compartment to physical properties and geochemical fluxes measured by all other clusters. In addition to a broad scale screening of the dynamics of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, we will further focus measurements and model efforts on fish and marine mammals representing key biological communities of economic importance such as fisheries with implications, benefits and challenges for human livelihoods. Questions we aim to address are: What abiotic and biotic fluxes determine the temporal change in productivity of the Arctic food-webs in the ocean fjord systems from prokaryotes, eukaryotes to vertebrates? What is the contribution of fluxes in nutrients to communities from land and glaciers? Does the marine biological dynamic partly determine the fluxes of nutrients from ocean to atmosphere and the atmosphere back to land? In this way, our cluster will measure and model the biological response to fluxes internal to fjord ecosystems across the land, ice, ocean and atmosphere.
We aim to quantify the diversity of microbial and macrobial communities using eDNA through coordinated coupling of research clusters, that in themselves, are measuring the inorganic and organic fluxes driving ecosystem state and climate. We will use eDNA sampling and sequencing to elucidate relationships between community dynamics and environmental properties to determine how biodiversity is affected by the rapid changes in fjord ecosystems over the duration of the growing season. Resolving diversity across prokaryotes, eukaryotes and vertebrates (incl. fish) communities in the context of biogeochemical cycling and fluxes across land, sea, ice and atmosphere has never been done before to our knowledge. While some studies have measured diversity patterns with regard to all three domains of life from specific sample types like soil, their patterns in diversity have not been coupled with biogeochemical fluxes between land, ocean and atmosphere. A single previous study has measured microbial diversity in air, surfaces and water in the Arctic, but did not connect the fluxes to organisms further up the food chain nor relate diversity to biogeochemical fluxes, leaving much to be understood about how the total biosphere is influenced by the movement of nutrients and minerals between land, ocean and atmosphere in coastal fjord ecosystems. Thus this would be the first study that links biogeochemical fluxes with the patterns and potential responses in the total diversity of life. This project and research theme, beyond progress in basic research, is intricately related to major societal goals and priorities of increasing environmental concern: the loss of biodiversity in relation with climate change and drivers of population dynamics in food supplies from natural systems including fisheries and other resource provisions.
Cluster Project Investigators
Prof Dr Loïc Pellissier, Landscape Ecology Research Group, WSL / ETH Zurich
Prof Dr Kristy Deiner, Assistant Professor of Environmental DNA at ETH Zurich
Cluster Participants
Dr Virginie Marques, Landscape Ecology Research Group, WSL / ETH Zurich
Enrico van der Loo, Landscape Ecology Research Group, WSL / ETH Zurich
Dr. Meike Vogt, Environmental Physics group, ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr Shinichi Sunagawa, Institute of Microbiology, ETH Zurich