Publication Date:
2006-03-11
Description:
Until recently, northern Bering Sea ecosystems were characterized by extensive seasonal sea ice cover, high water column and sediment carbon production, and tight pelagic-benthic coupling of organic production. Here, we show that these ecosystems are shifting away from these characteristics. Changes in biological communities are contemporaneous with shifts in regional atmospheric and hydrographic forcing. In the past decade, geographic displacement of marine mammal population distributions has coincided with a reduction of benthic prey populations, an increase in pelagic fish, a reduction in sea ice, and an increase in air and ocean temperatures. These changes now observed on the shallow shelf of the northern Bering Sea should be expected to affect a much broader portion of the Pacific-influenced sector of the Arctic Ocean.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Grebmeier, Jacqueline M -- Overland, James E -- Moore, Sue E -- Farley, Ed V -- Carmack, Eddy C -- Cooper, Lee W -- Frey, Karen E -- Helle, John H -- McLaughlin, Fiona A -- McNutt, S Lyn -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2006 Mar 10;311(5766):1461-4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecology Group, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 10515 Research Drive, Building A, Suite 100, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37932, USA. jgrebmei@utk.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16527980" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Arctic Regions
;
Ducks
;
*Ecosystem
;
Fishes
;
Geologic Sediments/chemistry
;
*Ice Cover
;
Oxygen/analysis
;
Pacific Ocean
;
Population Dynamics
;
Temperature
;
Walruses
;
Whales
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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