Description: Germany intends to present the Scientific Committee the background document that provides the scientific basis for the evaluation of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Weddell Sea. Please note, that the current state of the background document presents a comprehensive yet incomplete first version concerning chapters that have to be (further) developed or revised. The contents and structure of the document reflect also its main objectives, i.e. (i) to set out the general background and context of the establishment of MPAs, (ii) to describe the boundaries of the Weddell Sea MPA Planning Area, (iii) to inform on the data retrieval process, (iv) to provide - for the first time- a comprehensive, yet succinct, general description of the Weddell Sea ecosystem to reflect the state of the science, and additionally to present the results of the various preliminary scientific analyses that were carried out so far within the framework of the MPA Weddell Sea project, and finally (v) to describe future work beyond the development of the scientific basis for the evaluation of a Weddell Sea MPA.

Description: Mollusks record valuable information in their hard parts that reflect ambient environmental conditions. For this reason, shells can serve as excellent archives to reconstruct past climate and environmental variability. However, animal physiology and biomineralization, which are often poorly un- derstood, can make the decoding of environmental signals a challenging task. Many of the routinely used shell-based proxies are sensitive to multiple different environmental and physiological variables. Therefore, the identification and in- terpretation of individual environmental signals (e.g., water temperature) often is particularly difficult. Additional prox- ies not influenced by multiple environmental variables or an- imal physiology would be a great asset in the field of paleo- climatology. The aim of this study is to investigate the poten- tial use of structural properties of Arctica islandica shells as an environmental proxy. A total of 11 specimens were ana- lyzed to study if changes of the microstructural organization of this marine bivalve are related to environmental condi- tions. In order to limit the interference of multiple parame- ters, the samples were cultured under controlled conditions. Three specimens presented here were grown at two different water temperatures (10 and 15◦C) for multiple weeks and exposed only to ambient food conditions. An additional eight specimens were reared under three different dietary regimes. Shell material was analyzed with two techniques; (1) confo- cal Raman microscopy (CRM) was used to quantify changes of the orientation of microstructural units and pigment dis-tribution, and (2) scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to detect changes in microstructural organization. Our results indicate that A. islandica microstructure is not sen- sitive to changes in the food source and, likely, shell pig- ment are not altered by diet. However, seawater temperature had a statistically significant effect on the orientation of the biomineral. Although additional work is required, the results presented here suggest that the crystallographic orientation of biomineral units of A. islandica may serve as an alterna- tive and independent proxy for seawater temperature.

Description: The Collector's App is a platform-independent (macOS, Linux and Windows) software written in Python. The Collector's App allows biological data to be quality-checked and stored in CRITTERBASE, which is a science-driven PostgreSQL data warehouse for marine biota. For further data processing and statistical analyses or modelling purposes, the respective data can be queried directly via SQL from your CRITTERBASE data warehouse.

Description: The following downloadable R scripts for calculating the repeated accessibility are available here: 1. "Download of daily sea ice raster" - The R script automatically downloads all GeoTiffs from IUP, University of Bremen, and saves them in the directory of your choice. 2. "Existing and missing data" - The R script uses the downloaded GeoTiffs to create a table showing for which days satellite images are available and for which days they are not. 3. "Information of GeoTiffs" - The R script extracts important metadata of the downloaded GeoTiffs such as geographical projection, spatial extent and maximum value. A metadata table is created. 4. "Repeated accessibility" - The R script performs the repeated accessibility calculation based on a selectable threshold of sea ice concentration.

Description: The study of ecosystem functioning – the fluxes of energy and material through biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem – is becoming increasingly important in benthic ecological research. We investigated the functional structure of macrozoobenthic communities at four long-term sampling sites in the southern North Sea using biological traits assigned to life history, morphological and behavioural characteristics. The “typical” species of the macrofaunal assemblages at the sampling sites was characterized by small to medium body size, infaunal burrowing life style, deposit feeding habit, omnivory diet type, short to medium life span, gonochoristic sexual differentiation, 〈 2 years age at maturity, high fecundity, and planktotrophic development mode. Functional diversity differed significantly among the four sites. As part of the present study, trait information for 〉 330 macrofaunal taxa have been compiled in a comprehensive database.