Description: Understanding and responding to the rapidly occurring environmental changes in the Arctic over the past few decades require new approaches in science. This includes improved collaborations within the scientific community but also enhanced dialogue between scientists and societal stakeholders, especially with Arctic communities. As a contribution to the Third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARPIII), the Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART) network held an international workshop in France, in October 2014, in order to discuss high-priority requirements for future Arctic marine and coastal research from an early-career scientists (ECS) perspective. The discussion encompassed a variety of research fields, including topics of oceanographic conditions, sea-ice monitoring, marine biodiversity, land-ocean interactions, and geological reconstructions, as well as law and governance issues. Participants of the workshop strongly agreed on the need to enhance interdisciplinarity in order to collect comprehensive knowledge about the modern and past Arctic Ocean's geo-ecological dynamics. Such knowledge enables improved predictions of Arctic developments and provides the basis for elaborate decision-making on future actions under plausible environmental and climate scenarios in the high northern latitudes. Priority research sheets resulting from the workshop's discussions were distributed during the ICARPIII meetings in April 2015 in Japan, and are publicly available online.

Description: Through the transfer of carbon from the surface to the deep ocean via the passive sinking and active transport of organic material, the biological pump is a key global process for the regulation of atmospheric CO2. Over the last decades, studies relying on sediment traps and other bio-devices moored over an annual cycle in the Arctic Ocean helped to resolve how the Arctic biological pump is operating and how it is responding to global change. Here, we provide a short review of the pioneer work done in the 1980-90’s and we present key knowledge gained on Arctic ecosystem functioning with a series of case-studies conducted in the 2000’s on the basis of bio-moorings: (1) carbon export in response to warm anomalies in the main Arctic gateway, the Fram Strait; (2) ecosystem-level analyses in Beaufort Sea from a vertical flux perspective; (3) the importance of lateral processes for sinking flux events in the Central Basin; and (4) the impact of zooplankton life-cycle strategies on the biological pump in fjord-like systems. We also identify regional challenges and potential future research avenues in terms of new sampling tools and coordination for the development of an Arctic biogeochemical observatory network aligned with global initiatives. As such, this paper represents a call to sustain and further develop observing activities that rely on bio-mooring arrays in the Arctic Ocean over the next decade. By capturing the full seasonality of ice-covered environments, we argue that bio-moorings are one of the most powerful approaches to distinguish natural variability from actual shifts that might affect the structure and function of Arctic marine ecosystems in response to human-induced changes.

Description: Understanding and responding to the rapidly occurring environmental changes in the Arctic over the past few decades require new approaches in science. This includes improved collaborations within the scientific community but also enhanced dialogue between scientists and societal stakeholders, especially with Arctic communities. As a contribution to the Third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARPIII), the Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART) network held an international workshop in France, in October 2014, in order to discuss high-priority requirements for future Arctic marine and coastal research from an early-career scientists (ECS) perspective. The discussion encompassed a variety of research fields, including topics of oceanographic conditions, sea-ice monitoring, marine biodiversity, land-ocean interactions, and geological reconstructions, as well as law and governance issues. Participants of the workshop strongly agreed on the need to enhance interdisciplinarity in order to collect comprehensive knowledge about the modern and past Arctic Ocean's geo-ecological dynamics. Such knowledge enables improved predictions of Arctic developments and provides the basis for elaborate decision-making on future actions under plausible environmental and climate scenarios in the high northern latitudes. Priority research sheets resulting from the workshop's discussions were distributed during the ICARPIII meetings in April 2015 in Japan, and are publicly available online.

Description: The Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART) network in cooperation with the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) and European Institute for Marine Science (IUEM) organized an international multidisciplinary science workshop “Integrating spatial and temporal scales in the changing Arctic System: towards future research priorities” (ISTAS) in October 2014. The workshop aimed at discussing future priorities of Arctic research from an early career scientists’ perspective. In total, 76 scientists from thirteen different countries participated in the workshop, 60% of them were early to mid-career researchers. In plenary and parallel sessions, trends and variability in the Arctic marine and coastal systems were reviewed over various spatial and temporal scales in order to better understand the presently changing Arctic system as a whole. Participants presented the newest results of their ongoing research, which eventually fed into comprehensive discussions on future Arctic research priorities on biological and physical oceanography, sea ice, marine biodiversity, land-ocean interactions, paleo-reconstruction and biological archives, as well as law and economics. Here we present the fact sheets, the main outcome of the workshop which highlights the research directions from the perspective of early career scientists. This is of great importance to ensure the involvement of the next generation of Arctic researchers and their contribution to the ICARP III process.

Description: Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, simplifying access to oil and gas resources, enabling trans-Arctic shipping, and shifting the distribution of harvestable resources. This has brought the Arctic Ocean to the top of national and international political agendas. Alarmingly, sea-ice reductions are taking place more rapidly than predicted in any global climate model. This persistent mismatch between observed and predicted patterns makes planning and mitigation activities in the Arctic region even more complicated. Therefore, scientific knowledge of the present status of the Arctic Ocean and the process-based understanding of the mechanics of change are urgently needed to make useful predictions of future conditions throughout the Arctic region. Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART; http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/en/ART/) is a pan-Arctic scientific Network developed and steered by early-career scientists, which aims at studying the impact of environmental changes on the Arctic marine ecosystem. ART has a focus on bridging time-scales by incorporating paleo-studies with modern observations and modelling, science disciplines and geographic regions to better understand past and present response of Arctic marine ecosystems to sea ice transitions and climate change and to improve our predictive capability of future scenarios. Initiated as a continuation of the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning II (ICARP II) Marine Roundtable initiated in 2008, ART transited to a new status by becoming an official IASC Network in 2013. The first phase of ART (2010-2014) focuses on developing a formal network to bring together scientists working in different geographic and disciplinary areas who share a common interest in improving our understanding of Arctic change. The Second ART Science Workshop was held 21-24 October 2014 in Brest, France, in collaboration with the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS), the Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN) and the European Institute for Marine Studies. During this international workshop entitled “Integrating spatial and temporal scales in the changing Arctic System: towards future research priorities” (ISTAS) research priorities from an early to mid-career perspective were drafted which will feed into the third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP III) in Toyama, Japan in 2015. This workshop brought together about 70 early career, mid-career and senior scientists from different Arctic research areas including marine, cryosphere, atmosphere, terrestrial, and socio-economic topics to ensure knowledge transfer across generations and disciplines. The second phase of ART (2014-2018) will be centered on active data collection, such as through the TRANSSIZ (Transitions in the Arctic Seasonal Sea Ice Zone) expedition, which is included in the cruise plan of the German RV ‘Polarstern’ in spring 2015. The final phase of ART will be a synthesis stage, so that the legacy of ART will be a coherent set of knowledge, which would feed into physical-biological models at various scales in order to develop more robust scenarios regarding the future state of Arctic coastal and marine ecosystems, their productive capacity, how they impact the dynamics of greenhouse gases, as well as their role in global processes.