Abstract
There is a need to expand our knowledge of marine ecosystems in north Norwegian waters. This project specifically focuses on the demand for cost effective and representative mapping and monitoring of benthic communities in habitat types of particular conc ern, as a basis for sustainable ecosystem management. Marine sedimentary habitats constitute large ecosystems worldwide and their benthic communities significantly impact major ecological processes, such as geochemical cycling, secondary production, pollu tant distributions, and stability of sediments. Current marine management policies are strictly based on the maintenance of biological diversity, but our knowledge of marine benthos is lacking in geographic range, especially in the deep sea and at higher latitudes. In addition, there is an urgent need to monitor marine ecosystems in the face of environmental change. Traditional methods for identification of benthic organisms are exceedingly labour-intensive and time-consuming, and therefore, expensive. Al so, diversity assessments require extensive taxonomic expertise, and are usually limited to a part of the existing biodiversity, typically the macro fraction of the biota. As a result, there is an obvious mismatch between the need for representative biodi versity assessments and the resources at hand. DNA based methods offer the beginning of a possible solution to these shortcomings. The current project applies DNA barcoding and high-throughput sequencing technologies to analyze the benthic communities fro m bulk sediment samples, from a natural depth gradient in a fjord basin, and from environments influenced by aquaculture and oil production. We will further contribute to holistic and coherent methods for biodiversity assessment and monitoring. We aim to significantly expand our knowledge on the benthic biodiversity in boreal waters and contribute to molecular reference databases, in particular focusing on an important taxonomic group, the marine nematodes.
Norway