Life associated with Baltic Sea ice

1. The formation of sea ice impacts directly on the physical dynamics of water masses (e.g. wind stress at the sea surface) and air-sea exchange processes (e.g. vertical heat fluxes). 2. The annual cycle of formation, consolidation and melting of sea ice has a major influence on the ecology of both the benthic and pelagic components of the Baltic Sea ecosystem. 3. There is considerable inter-annual variation in the extent of sea ice in the Baltic Sea and thus in the size of the habitat for sympagic (ice-associated) microbial and metazoan communities as well as for larger organisms living on the ice, notably the ringed seal. 4. There is a pronounced gradient in ice characteristics, from more saline ice in the south of the Baltic Sea to freshwater ice in the north. The former is more porous and supports more ice-associated biology than the latter. 5. The Baltic sympagic communities consist mainly of prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes (bacteria, diatoms, dinoflagellates, flagellates), ciliates and rotifers. These communities are recruited from the plankton when the ice forms, followed by an ice-adapted successional pattern with an expansion of substrate-bound pennate diatoms, which does not occur in the seawater beneath the ice. 6. The sea-ice food webs inside the ice are truncated compared to the open-water food webs because organisms larger than the upper size limit of the brine channels are lacking in the internal sympagic communities. 7. Global climate change decreases the extension and thickness of the sea ice as well as the length of the ice season, and therefore the seasonal effects that sea ice has on the Baltic Sea winter-spring ecosystem dynamics.