From marine cold spells to heatwaves: Climatic impacts on a polar shallow-water ecosystem

Global warming affects the Earth system in complex ways, often preventing a functional understanding of the underlying processes. Disentangling these processes between abiotic drivers and single species or entire communities is, however, essential for an in-depth understanding of climate change impacts on the ecosystem. Using a high-resolution time series on heatwaves and cold spells in an Arctic fjord system, we show that for analysing the effects of environmental stressors on biota, AI supported digital data processing based on state-of-the-art observatory technology can provide insights in habitat-community interactions which are not possible with classic expedition-based sampling methods. Furthermore, our study shows that short-term event-based anomalies in key ocean variables may have an even stronger impact on a communities structure than long-term climate change trends.