Dr Anna Gebruk

ALT Interest in the deep Arctic Ocean is rapidly increasing from governments, policy makers, industry, researchers, and conservation groups, accentuated by the growing accessibility of this remote region by surface vessel traffic. In this review, our goal is to provide an updated taxonomic inventory of benthic taxa known to occur in the deep Arctic Ocean and relate this inventory to habitat diversity. To achieve this goal, we collected data for Arctic metazoan deep-sea taxa from open-access databases, information facilities, and non-digitised scientific literature, limiting the collection to the area north of 66°N and below 500 m depth (excluding all shelf seas). Although notable progress has been made in understanding the deep Arctic using novel technologies and infrastructure, this data gathering shows that knowledge of deep-sea benthic Arctic communities remains very limited. Yet, through our compilation of habitat maps, we show that the Arctic contains a high diversity...