User:Seacucumberqueue/draft article on arctic ocean

Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD) is a field project of the Census of Marine Life and an international collaborative effort to inventory biodiversity in the Arctic sea ice, water column and sea floor from the shallow shelves to the deep basins.

ArcOD aims at: compiling a species inventory of existing Arctic Ocean species and identifying species community and richness trends, identifying bio-geographic affinities and barriers, and identifying the relation between species distribution patterns and richness and environmental data in an attempt to draw conclusions and predictions about Arctic climate change. Emphasis on the documentation of present biodiversity is essential in establishing baseline data for detecting the effects of changing environmental conditions on marine biota.

ArcOD efforts have thus entailed improving the taxonomic resolution of existing samples, increasing the number of new samples, extending the sampling area, providing the material to taxonomic experts worldwide, and compiling the results into databases accessible to scientists and the public (through Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), the Global Biodiversity Information System (GBIF), and an Arctic Register of Marine Species (ARMS) with help from with help from the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS).   ArcOD also contributes Arctic material to several barcoding efforts, all under the umbrella of the Barcode of Life Initiative. For example, zooplankton is sent to the Census of Marine Zooplankton (CMarZ); fish to the Fish Barcode of Life (Fish-BOL) project. Finally, ArcOD is lead for the Arctic Ocean diversity cluster within the International Polar Year.

ArcOD is led by Dr. Bodil Bluhm, Dr. Rolf Gradinger and Dr. Russ Hopcroft all from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska, USA.