The need for increased protection of Antarctica's inland waters

Abstract

Protection of Antarctica's biodiversity and ecosystem values is enshrined in the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which provides for the designation of Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPAs) to areas with outstanding values. Concern has been raised that existing ASPAs fail to prioritize areas to maximize the likelihood of ensuring the long-term conservation of Antarctic ecosystems and biodiversity. The absence of systematic and representative protection is particularly acute for inland aquatic ecosystems, which support a disproportionate amount of inland biodiversity. This paper promotes the case for overt inclusion of inland waters as a critical component of a representative protected area framework for Antarctica, thereby addressing their current underrepresentation. We set out a structured approach to enable the selection of representative freshwater systems for inclusion in the ASPA framework that, with modification, could also be applied across other Antarctic habitats. We acknowledge an overall lack of information on the biogeography of inland aquatic diversity and recommend increased use of remote data collection along with classification tools to mitigate this, as well as the need for the consideration of catchment-scale processes. Changes that accompany contemporary and anticipated climate change make the need for the conservation of representative biodiversity increasingly urgent.

Antarctic extreme events

“…Lakes in Antarctica may be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate warming, with magnified rates of response in terms of factors such as the extent and duration of winter ice cover, water temperature, mixing and eutrophication (Butler, 1999;Quayle et al, 2002). Lake and other freshwater ecosystems are particularly understudied and undocumented in Antarctica, with work in this field representing a high conservation priority (Hawes et al, 2023). Many are small, shallow and vulnerable to changes in inflow and outflow, and catastrophic drainage can occur in instances where glacial or permafrost 'dams' are lost with melting (e.g., see Rosa et al, 2022).…”

Revealing the hidden biodiversity of Antarctic and the Magellanic Sub-Antarctic Ecoregion: A comprehensive study of aquatic invertebrates from the BASE Project

“…From another perspective, Antarctica and the SO have been under the Antarctic Treaty System since 1961, in which signatory nations agree to prioritise current and future management and protection of the continent's biodiversity and ecosystem values. Comprehensive protection of the Antarctica environment cannot be addressed without a complete, unbiased and systematic publication of biodiversity data ensuring the accomplishment of such a crucial endeavour ( Wauchope et al 2019 , Hawes et al 2023 ).…”

“…In this regard, the intertidal and shallow subtidal environments of Antarctica and Subantarctic environments are considerably less well-sampled than either the surrounding deep sea ( Brandt et al 2014 , Ojeda et al 2014 , Griffiths and Waller 2016 , Rosenfeld et al 2017 , Aldea et al 2020 , Jossart et al 2023 ). Likewise, in continental environments, recent studies have identified important sampling gaps in Antarctica and Subantarctic ecoregions ( Chown and Convey 2016 , Maturana et al 2019 , Ganan et al 2021 , Hawes et al 2023 ). The Subantarctic environments represent a large and remote geographic area and, due to its extreme conditions (climatic and oceanographic) ( Griffiths and Waller 2016 ), it denotes a challenge when undertaking biodiversity inventories.…”