T3-8 Ecosystems of the Southern Ocean

This multidisciplinary session is focused on Southern Ocean ecosystem research and understanding the response of individual species, food webs and whole ecosystems to change. The Southern Ocean supports unique ecosystems, components of which are commercially exploited, and has an important influence on global carbon and nutrient budgets. Some areas are undergoing rapid warming, whilst other areas are cooling and the consequences of this change on the food webs, their capacity to maintain fisheries and their role in biogeochemical cycles are largely unknown. This session is designed to encourage presentations on work undertaken during IPY that has examined the controls on distribution and abundance of individual species; the factors affecting the structure and operation of food webs; and the links between benthic and pelagic food webs, climate and ecosystems, ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles, and ecosystems and fisheries.

The session has been developed by the Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Southern Ocean (ICED) programme, which was launched during the IPY and, through the consortium ICED-IPY. During IPY, multidisciplinary activities have furthered our understanding of ecosystem operation in the context of climate processes, ocean physics, biogeochemistry, food web dynamics and fisheries. We welcome contributions from programmes with a Southern Ocean focus, including GLOBEC, CAML, SOLAS and CLIVAR, which are not directly involved in ICED-IPY, undertaking related studies. This session will provide a forum for integrating ICED-IPY results with other relevant Southern Ocean studies, as well as with the broader IPY community. ICED is a regional programme of the IGBP programme IMBER. For more information visit http://www.iced.ac.uk/