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Ecophysiological Performance of Benthic Diatoms from Arctic Waters

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The Diatom World

Part of the book series: Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology ((COLE,volume 19))

Abstract

The benthos of shallow water coastal zones in the Arctic region consists of a consortium of eukaryotic and prokaryotic microorganisms of high biodiversity. The dominant organisms are benthic diatoms, which form an assemblage referred to as microphytobenthos. This phototrophic community is generally known from temperate marine regions as being highly productive and providing a major food source for benthic suspension or deposit feeders (Cahoon, 1999), as filter for oxygen and other elemental fluxes at the sediment/water interface (Risgaard-Petersen et al., 1994) and as stabiliser of sediment surfaces by the excretion of extracellular polymeric substances (DeBrouwer et al., 2005). Consequently, microphytobenthos represents a key component in the functioning of trophic webs in many coastal regions. Some marine ecosystems, such as the German Wadden Sea, are mainly controlled by the production biology of benthic diatoms. However, structure and function of microphytobenthic communities are badly studied in the Arctic regions (Glud et al., 2009).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mandy Rickler for providing some of the ecophysiological data. The field work has been performed at the Ny-Ålesund International Arctic environmental Research and Monitoring Facility and under the agreement on scientific cooperation between the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Rostock. The authors thank the crew and divers at the AWIPEV-base in Ny Ålesund for technical support. We greatly appreciate financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Projects Ka 899/12-1/2/3 and Ka 899/15-1) and by ARCFAC V (project nr. 026129–70).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Biological Sciences, Applied Ecology, University of Rostock, D-18057, Rostock, Germany

    Carolin Schlie, Jana Woelfel, Franziska Rüdiger, Rhena Schumann & Ulf Karsten

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  1. Carolin Schlie
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Correspondence to Carolin Schlie .

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  1. Jerusalem, The Hebrew University Of, P.O.Box 1132, Efrat, 90435, Israel

    Joseph Seckbach

  2. , Dept. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Museum of Natural, Henderson Bldg., 15th & Broadway, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    Patrick Kociolek

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Schlie, C., Woelfel, J., Rüdiger, F., Schumann, R., Karsten, U. (2011). Ecophysiological Performance of Benthic Diatoms from Arctic Waters. In: Seckbach, J., Kociolek, P. (eds) The Diatom World. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1327-7_19

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