Impacts of deglaciation on benthic marine ecosystems in Antarctica

冰川融化和冰川消融扰动引起的环境变化将在不同程度的生物复杂性和时空尺度上对南极生态系统产生重大影响。在较低的生物组织水平上，温度、盐度、生产力和浊度等关键环境参数的变化可能会对个体的生长、存活和繁殖力等重要的适应性特征产生重大影响。这些影响可能会渗透到更高的组织级别，如人口和社区级别。因此，较低的增长、较高的死亡率和较低的生育率可能会影响当地人口的人口动态。此外，在群落规模上，在紧张的环境中，一些物种可能会局部灭绝，或者由于个体表现的下降，它们可能会被更强大的竞争者击败。或者，竞争能力较弱的先锋物种将在高度扰动的地点占据主导地位。这样，冰川融化和冰川消融的干扰可能会在不同的方向和空间尺度上促进物种多样性和群落结构的变化，使群落向交替的稳定状态移动。在更长的时间尺度上，所有这些生态效应在决定遗传多样性和基因流动方面都会在进化尺度上产生后果，这可能会降低物种的进化潜力。在这种情况下，该项目旨在调查气候变暖引起的冰川消融引起的物理干扰对西南极半岛周围海底群落的影响。我们采取了跨嵌套尺度的多学科方法，从个体到生态系统层面，从生态到进化尺度，评估这种扰动的遗传、生理、种群、群落和生态系统影响。此外，我们还利用核年代学开发了重建南极洲长期和短期环境变化的生物指标。

Environmental changes due to ice loss and deglaciation disturbances will significantly impact Antarctic ecosystems at different levels of biological complexity and spatio-temporal scales. At the lower level of biological organization, changes in key environmental parameters, such as temperature, salinity, productivity and turbidity, may have significant effects on important fitness traits such as growth, survival and fecundity of individuals. These effects may percolate to higher levels of organization such as population and community levels. Thus, lower growth, higher mortality rates and lower fecundity may affect the demographic dynamics of local populations. In addition, at a community scale, in a stressed environment some species may become locally extinct or they may be outcompeted by stronger competitors due to a decrease in individual performance. Alternatively, pioneer species with weak competition abilities would dominate highly perturbed sites. In this way, ice loss and disturbance from deglaciation may promote changes in species diversity and community structure at different directions and spatial scales, moving communities to alternate stable states. Over a longer time scale, all these ecological effects have consequences on an evolutionary scale in determining genetic diversity and gene flow, which may reduce the evolutionary potential of species. Under this scenario, this project aims to investigate the impacts of physical disturbance arising from climate-warming induced deglaciation on benthic communities around the West Antarctic Peninsula. We adopt a multidisciplinary approach across nested scales from individual to ecosystem level, and from an ecological to evolutionary scale, evaluating genetic, physiological, population, community and ecosystem impacts of this perturbation. In addition, we use sclerochronology to develop biological proxies for reconstructing long-term and short-term environmental changes in Antarctica.