Summary
The Sloan Foundation is sponsoring a Census of Marine Life workshop to combine the expertise of scientists from different areas to explore the present and prospective limits to the knowledge of marine life in the Arctic Ocean and adjacent Bering Sea. The Census of Marine Life is a major international research program assessing and explaining the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine organisms throughout the world's oceans. It is intended to culminate in 2010 with reports on what is known, what is unknown at present but may be knowable, and what we may never know about marine biodiversity. One of the world’s oceans that is still heavily under-represented by the current inventory efforts of CoML is the Arctic Ocean.
The focus of this workshop will be to determine what is already known about these areas, what is yet unknown and also what may be unknowable. For this workshop, there will be two specific programs. One is a joint international effort to outline a proposal to conduct a long (circa 1500 km) biodiversity transect across the Arctic Ocean. A selected group of scientists from the US, Russia, Canada, Great Britain, Norway, Denmark and Germany have been invited to debate and develop this idea. During the workshop, each scientist will present a summary of the research that has been completed in their field of interest in the Arctic. The major outcome of the workshop will be an international proposal to conduct coordinated and shared research to inventory life in the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic transect could provide substantial evidence to the discussion of biodiversity in high latitudes, will serve as a baseline for process-oriented studies, and will allow better judgment on the impact of climatic changes on marine communities.
A second program will be the organization of a proposal for a series of short near-shore "NaGISA" transects around the Bering Sea. NaGISA is the nearshore component of the Census of Marine Life, working out to a depth of about 15 meters with protocols that are well established. From the proposed meeting, a NaGISA working group from the United States and Russia will produce a joint proposal to perform NaGISA transects around the Bering Sea. These transects will take a key position as a link between biodiversity studies at the east and the west Pacific/Bering coasts and thus between the longitudinal and latitudinal gradients covered within the NaGISA program, whose eventual goal is global coverage. In a biogeographical context the Bering Sea transects will provide valuable information about species distribution patterns, current and future range extensions of key species, and the presence and significance of biogeographical breaks.