Wild Atlantic salmon ( Salmo salar ) populations from many North Atlantic rivers have declined over recent decades. As these declines are thought to be driven largely by changes in the marine phase of the life cycle, there is a drive towards investigating causes and developing indicators for marine survival. Warming of rivers and seas is altering the smolt thermal environments and migration phenology. This may be causing incre...

Climate change is transforming marine ecosystems, opening new fishing possibilities for large‐scale trawling vessels in the Arctic. This study investigates the potential for new fishing grounds to emerge in West Greenland. We employed a maximum entropy model to predict fishing suitability based on climatological and time‐invariant variables alongside public fishing vessel data. The model, validated with high accuracy, identifi...

The changing Arctic environment is affecting zooplankton that support its abundant wildlife. We examined how these changes are influencing a key zooplankton species, Calanus finmarchicus , principally found in the North Atlantic but expatriated to the Arctic. Close to the ice-edge in the Fram Strait, we identified areas that, since the 1980s, are increasingly favourable to C. finmarchicus . Field-sampling revealed part of the...

The Arctic marine ecosystem is shaped by the seasonality of the solar cycle, spanning from 24-h light at the sea surface in summer to 24-h darkness in winter. The amount of light available for under-ice ecosystems is the result of different physical and biological processes that affect its path through atmosphere, snow, sea ice and water. In this article, we review the present state of knowledge of the abiotic (clouds, sea ice...

Bowhead whales ( Balaena mysticetus ) visit Disko Bay, West Greenland in winter and early spring to feed on Calanus spp., at a time of year when the copepods are still mostly in diapause and concentrated in near-bottom patches. Combining past observations of copepod abundance and distribution with detailed observations of bowhead whale foraging behaviour from telemetry suggests that if the whales target the highest-density pat...

In recent decades, the central Arctic Ocean has been experiencing dramatic decline in sea ice coverage, thickness and extent, which is expected to have a tremendous impact on all levels of Arctic marine life. Here, we analyze the regional and temporal changes in pan‐Arctic distribution and population structure of the key zooplankton species Calanus glacialis and C. hyperboreus in relation to recent changes in ice conditions, b...

Diapause plays a key role in the life cycle of high latitude zooplankton. During diapause, animals avoid starving in winter by living in deep waters where metabolism is lower and met by lipid reserves. Global warming is therefore expected to shorten the maximum potential diapause duration by increasing metabolic rates and by reducing body size and lipid reserves. This will alter the phenology of zooplankton, impact higher trop...