New Antarctic biodiversity database starts jigsaw of life across the continent, but many gaps remain

Antarctica, the land of ice and rock, is home to more life than you might expect.

Antarctica, the land of ice and rock, is home to more life than you might expect.

Besides iconic species like emperor penguins, thousands of species inhabit the icy continent. These creatures have survived in some of the world’s harshest conditions for millennia.

But questions about their future are emerging. Will they persist under rapid environmental change? How can we protect them from an expanding human footprint? And, most fundamentally, where do they occur?

Our latest research shows that we’re at the tip of the iceberg in understanding Antarctic biodiversity and we must use all the tools we have to make faster progress to protect the last of the wild.

Antarctica’s unique and vulnerable ecosystems

Life in Antarctica is unique and surprisingly diverse. Scattered rocky outcrops of ice-free land are home to tiny tardigrades that freeze and re-thaw, ‘forests’ of moss that can be hundreds of years old, and colonies of thousands of breeding penguins. These species survive in the cold, wind, and snow and have done so for thousands of years.

Yet Antarctica’s unique wildlife faces an uncertain future. Although all of Antarctica has some protection under the Antarctic Treaty, threats are growing in the region. The number of people visiting Antarctica for tourism and science continues to increase, and little of the continent remains completely untouched by human activity. Invasive species are beginning to appear in areas frequently visited by people. Parts of Antarctica are experiencing some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet due to global climate change.

There’s a toolbox of actions to counteract these threats, including establishing protected areas that restrict human access to a site, or ramping up biosecurity measures at a location. But to protect Antarctica in these ways, we must first know what species live where.

The challenges of surveys in Antarctica

Humans have collected information on Antarctic wildlife since the days of first exploration. Each visit to an ice-free location resulted in new observations of species that were carefully recorded. Modern data collection continues in the same spirit, with scientists and citizen scientists recording species locations and uploading information to global databases.

Despite these decades of research, Antarctica is very understudied compared to other parts of the world. Many locations in Antarctica are entirely inaccessible or very rarely visited since they are far from any infrastructure.

So, what do we know about Antarctic biodiversity?

Recently, there have been efforts to collate records of where species have been observed in Antarctica. Scientists spent years gathering records from publications and museums and have recently published a database of species locations across the continent. This map of life gives us an unprecedented understanding of what species are found where.

In our new research, we’ve taken a close look at this database and asked: what do we know about Antarctic biodiversity? To do so, we counted the number of records in different regions of Antarctica and examined what year they were collected and what species they recorded.

Our research confirms that while we’ve discovered a lot about Antarctic biodiversity, there’s plenty more work still to be done.

When we counted records of species across large areas of Antarctica, we found that up to 70% of the continent has some records, and they’re located across all the ecological regions of Antarctica. This is a fantastic foundation for a lot of important Antarctic science and management.

At a finer scale, counting records by 1km2 units revealed that there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge across large areas and just a fraction of ice-free land has most of the species records in it. While some regions, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, have many records, some regions of the continent have far fewer.

We know that gaps in our records don’t automatically mean these places have no life – instead, it suggests that records have not been collected on past visits. These gaps in our records are a significant challenge since the first step in comprehensively protecting Antarctic biodiversity is understanding where it is.

Our research also confirmed that while there is good coverage of the records in many places, records often tend to be clustered near scientific research stations. This makes sense since research stations are where many scientists will base themselves. It suggests, however, that the Antarctic life farthest from these stations might be less well understood and, therefore, more difficult to protect.

We also found that sites with few records of species can have quite different climates to the spots where we do have lots of records. This means that there could be inaccessible places, such as steep mountainsides, that have quite different conditions for life to live. Whether they are home to the same species as the well-studied sites remains a mystery.

Records in Antarctica were collected over decades of exploration, and the new database provides a valuable resource for understanding both current and past distributions of species. We also found that sites across the continent can really differ in how recently they were surveyed, with some sites having their most recent records from over 100 years ago. That suggests that in some places, we don’t have a clear and consistent picture of life from a single contemporary snapshot in time – let alone a way to understand long-term changes at those sites.

Looking to the future

To map and protect biodiversity, we need to rapidly grow our knowledge across a vast continent twice the size of Australia. The new database is an important step toward this. Although we’ve shown that we have some large gaps in our knowledge of Antarctic biodiversity, there’s a lot of potential for us to use existing and emerging tools to make the most of the knowledge we do have.

Ecological modelling is one approach that might help us overcome the challenges of surveying in Antarctica. Our research shows that over 90% of Antarctic species groups have enough data for us to create models of their distribution. Modelled distribution maps can be used to fill gaps in our knowledge of a species, identifying areas that might be suitable for a species to live and that should be further investigated. Modelling can also allow us to forecast future change under projected climates.

Modelling might also be paired with remote sensing to increase biodiversity knowledge, using technology like drones or satellites, which have been used to discover new penguin colonies and map the vegetation of Antarctica.

There is no doubt that data on where species occur are essential to informing conservation in Antarctica. By using all the tools we have, we can take these new and existing records and significantly advance our understanding of life in Antarctica to ensure its protection in the years to come.