Impact of Holocene environmental change on the evolutionary ecology of an Arctic top predator.

ABSTRACT: The Arctic is among the most climatically sensitive environments on Earth, and the disappearance of multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is predicted within decades. As apex predators, polar bears are sentinel species for addressing the impact of environmental variability on Arctic marine ecosystems. By integrating genomics, isotopic analysis, morphometrics, and ecological modeling, we investigate how Holocene environmental changes affected polar bears around Greenland. We uncover reductions in effective population size coinciding with increases in annual mean sea surface temperature, reduction in sea ice cover, declines in suitable habitat, and shifts in suitable habitat northward. Furthermore, we show that west and east Greenlandic polar bears are morphologically, and ecologically disti

SUBMITTER: Westbury MV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10631739 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature