Background

“The polar biological sciences stand on the threshold of a revolution, because the availability of genome sciences and other new enabling technologies has opened the door to study an incredible array of important questions and issues, both fundamental and practical. As this revolution occurs, we will enter a new era that holds the promise of a greatly enhanced understanding of polar ecosystems, their biodiversity, and the interactions of their constituent organisms and communities.”
- Frontiers in Polar Biology in the Genomic Era (2004)
National Research Council of the National Academies, USA

Enhancing our capacity to identify polar life is something for which there clearly is a critical need. As Ibisch et al. (2005) noted recently, “The anthropogenic climate change that is expected during the next century looms as an overarching and unprecedented threat to biodiversity. The predicted rate of warming alone may move many species well beyond their current climate-niche ranges.” (1). For conspicuous terrestrial vertebrates (the so-called “charismatic megafauna”), tracking climate-related changes in niche occupancy may be relatively straightforward. However, most life in polar regions, as elsewhere around the globe, is invertebrate and therefore presents major challenges for biomonitoring efforts reliant upon morphological identifications. Indeed, even in well studied temperate regions, biodiversity surveys of invertebrates often provide resolution only to the family level, making finer
assessments of species distributions impossible. Our plans to lay the foundation for a program of Polar Research Observatories for Biodiversity and the Environment (PROBE) will alleviate this impediment by using DNA-based approaches to identify and characterize the genetic, genomic, and species diversity in Canada’s polar regions. This will mark the first multi-taxon genetic biodiversity survey carried out anywhere in the world, and it will be an important proof-of-principle for the utility of applied DNAbased methods of species discrimination. It will also allow the use of biological, rather than geological or chemical, data to assess and predict the responses of living organisms to changes in their environment.
The few land-based research stations that remain active in Canada’s Arctic are key installations in efforts to monitor the impacts of climate change on northern biological systems. These facilities represent the observatories where we will track the response of organisms to global warming. However, the acute difficulty in gaining species identifications in Arctic Canada because of a lack of taxonomic specialists significantly impedes such efforts. Our research program is directed, in large measure, towards the resolution of this taxonomic impediment through the use of the simple but highly effective approach known as DNA barcoding. We will execute this work mainly at Churchill, Manitoba and at Resolute, Nunavut by analyzing two key indicator assemblages: animal species in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments and marine macroalgae. Although two years is not sufficient to complete an
ID system for the entirety of life at these sites, all common taxa in our target groups will be included.
Moreover, because many Arctic species are broadly distributed, our barcode results from these sites will aid biomonitoring across the Canadian Arctic. We further anticipate that our work will motivate a barcoding enterprise that will soon sweep across other taxonomic groups and across new sites in Canada’s north.
We emphasize that our investigations have implications that extend beyond resolution of the taxonomic impediment. Our collection program will provide an unrivalled source of carefully identified specimens that can fuel other important research ventures. For example, our own project will employ these specimens to probe the linkages between environmental conditions and large-scale genome evolution through analyses of genome size and ploidy. Because larger genome sizes and polyploidy are both more common in the north, this will contribute another important dimension to our groundbreaking DNA-based approach to biodiversity monitoring in sensitive polar environments. Moreover, because genome size is a critical consideration in large-scale genomics programs (especially complete sequencing), the generation of a well-sampled dataset of genome sizes from a range of Arctic taxa is likely to improve the incorporation of polar organisms in the next phase of genome science.