Spatial trends of benthic secondary productivity in the Arctic Ocean

Secondary production (i.e. the amount of organic material produced through time) has been recognized as a powerful tool in ecology to address questions of energy–biomass flow, trophic ecology, and management of biological resources. It is an integrative tool as it incorporates all of the information relative to the health status of a biological system (i.e., biomass, individual growth and community growth, reproduction, etc.). It consequently represents the cumulative responses of a population, community or ecosystem to its abiotic and biotic environment. In the context of global climate change, the Arctic system has experienced substantial and rapid changes with potential effects on marine ecosystem health. In that regard, secondary production may represent useful, quantitative tool for the assessment of ecosystem health and functioning, and may be an indicator of ecosystem change. The purpose of this study is to describe the spatial pattern of benthic secondary productivity in the Arctic Ocean from retrospective large datasets and ongoing studies, from published and unpublished sources. We use geostatistical and multivariate approaches to assess benthic productivity distribution patterns, as well as their relation to environmental factors by correlating environmental variables with biological observations. The understanding of the spatial patterns in productivity in the Arctic Ocean will be helpful to 1) assess the large-scale spatial variability of benthic ecosystem functioning, and 2) develop a metric to quantitatively assess benthic ecosystem health. Results will also contribute to develop a better understanding of the ecosystem-wide impacts of global change on the Arctic system and may acquire an economic importance as secondary production provides a measure of food provision delivered by an ecosystem