Abstract
The impacts of climate change on the Arctic Ocean are manifesting throughout the ecosystem at an unprecedented rate. Of global importance are the impacts on heat and freshwater exchange between the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. An expanding Atlantic influence in the Arctic has accelerated sea-ice decline, weakened water column stability and supported the northward shift of temperate species. The only deep-water gateway connecting the Arctic and North Atlantic and thus, fundamental for these exchange processes is the Fram Strait. Previous research in this region is extensive, however, data on the ecology of microbial communities is limited, reflecting the wider bias towards temperate and tropical latitudes. Therefore, we present 14 metagenomes, 11 short-read from Illumina and three long-read from PacBio Sequel II, of the 0.2–3 µm fraction to help alleviate such biases and support future analyses on changing ecological patterns. Additionally, we provide 136 species-representative, manually refined metagenome-assembled genomes which can be used for comparative genomics analyses and addressing questions regarding functionality or distribution of taxa.
Highlights
The Arctic Ocean is a critical component in the maintenance of Earth’s energy balance and the regulation of global climate
Those with a temperature < 0 ◦C and a salinity of < 34 psu were labelled as Arctic whereas those with a temperature of >5 ◦C and a salinity of ∼35 psu were labelled as Atlantic, in accordance with previous studies (Rudels et al, 2013; Fadeev et al, 2018)
Comparing the community composition identified across samples resulted in three distinct clusters reflecting the Artic, Atlantic and mixed water masses (Fig. S2) that were identified based on variations in abiotic parameters (Table S1)
Summary
The Arctic Ocean is a critical component in the maintenance of Earth’s energy balance and the regulation of global climate. The inflowing Atlantic water has doubled in volume in the last 30 years (Oziel et al, 2020) and increased in temperature by 1.4 ◦C (Neukermans, Oziel & Babin, 2018). These phenomena are evidence of a much broader and more long-term transition in the state of the Arctic Ocean ecosystem
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