Fig 1.
Map of study area showing sea ice duration.
Sampling stations in northeast Greenland, with sea ice duration from August 2021 to August 2022. Colours represent different environments: blue–coastal, orange–shelf. Sea ice duration data are from gridded (resolution 3.125 km) satellite data downloaded from https://seaice.uni-bremen.de/sea-ice-concentration/ [48]. Lines show the extent of fast ice on the 15th of March (dotted black) and 15th of August 2022 (blue), obtained from the MET Norway Ice Service at https://cryo.met.no/en/latest-ice-charts. Coastline data are from Natural Earth [49].
Table 1.
Sampling information for each station in the study in northeast Greenland.
Table 2.
Distribution of target highly branched isoprenoids (HBIs) in northeast Greenland.
Fig 2.
H-Print of benthos at each station.
Mean H-Print of fauna at each station on the Northeast Greenland shelf. Black lines represent standard error, and open triangles represent individual data points. Stations are coloured according to habitat: orange are shelf stations; blue are coastal stations. Square brackets below the bars group statistically similar station means, determined by a post-hoc Tukey test.
Table 3.
ANOVA results for benthic invertebrate H-Print.
Fig 3.
Proportion of sympagic organic matter in benthos.
Estimates of the proportion of sympagic OM (iPOC %) assimilated in benthic invertebrates (a) at each station and (b) by habitat type, coloured according to habitat. Open triangles are individual data points, filled black circles are outliers. Boxes show the interquartile range. The vertical black line in each box is the median. Horizontal black lines include data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range of the lower and upper quartile. Numbers on the right are sample size. Note the restricted x-axis range.
Fig 4.
Relationship between sea ice duration and sympagic organic matter in benthos.
Proportion of sympagic OM assimilated (iPOC %) in benthic invertebrates from northeast Greenland based on the H-Print approach against sea ice duration at each station, separated by habitat type: shelf stations are in orange, coastal stations are in blue. Lines represent a linear model for each habitat, with associated 95% confidence intervals. Note the restricted x and y axes ranges.
Table 4.
Regression model diagnostics.