High-resolution description of insular and fjordic benthic food webs in Antarctica

When it comes to global change, the poles are among the most impacted regions on our planet. Since the last world war, the Antarctic continent in particular experienced warming rates four times higher than the rest of the planet. This modification of the Antarctic climate has huge implications for the remote ecosystems that this continent harbours, where organisms have evolved to cope with the harsh local environmental conditions. Indeed, changes in abiotic parameters all around Antarctica are already causing some noticeable change in ecosystems dynamics, both on land and at sea. These perturbations will likely cause fundamental changes in some core characteristics of Antarctic ecosystems, one of them being the feeding interactions between marine organisms. Yet, information is lacking on how the different environmental factors shape Antarctic food-webs, especially in shallow-water benthic communities. With the EVOSOUTH project, we aim to depict quantitatively the variability of shallow-water benthic food-webs along the Antarctic Peninsula, with a focus on two different representative habitats: the sedimentary soft-bottoms and the shallow macroalgae forests. There, we will take advantage of the gradient of environmental conditions that exists along the Peninsula to explore how they shape the properties of food-webs, and gain some insight on their possible evolution under scenarios of future change in the region. This work will contribute to the TANGO project, a collaboration between the Universities of Liège, Ghent, and Brussels as well as the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. Through four work packages going from the individual response of organisms to environmental changes all the way up to a mechanistic modelling of the benthic ecosystems of the peninsula, this project aims to predict tipping points leading to regime shifts in Antarctic benthic ecosystems.