Arctic Benthos and Climate Change - The Red Queen's race

Currently Arctic ecosystems seem to change much faster than new research and expeditions can be planned, conducted and evaluated. Under these dynamic conditions, it is almost impossible to establish a baseline that represents pre-change system state. Our initiative of a ”pan-Arctic benthic database” intends to overcome this problem by combining all available biological and ecological data (published and unpublished) in one geo-referenced database to get a better view on the whole Arctic biosphere and its dynamics. We aim at understanding benthic structures (community composition, biodiversity, food web) and processes (production, metabolism) on large scales and at modeling the impact of environmental drivers on the benthic system. Here we demonstrate this approach with respect to the rather poorly known central Arctic benthic system, based on benthic macrofauna data derived from Arctic POLARSTERN expeditions during the last 20 years. We show the spatial distribution of basic benthic community parameters (biomass, biodiversity), of community production and how these parameters are distributet between the major taxonomic groups.