Echinoderms of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land

To document and understand the causes and consequences of changes in biodiversity, information must be available on the characteristic biogeographical distributions of species throughout our planet. The remote Arctic, is one area where information is particularly limited. Although the benthic fauna of the Svalbard and Franz Josef Land areas in the Barents Sea have been studied internationally since the middle of the 19th century, no systematic assessment has been carried out of the available literature. For Franz Josef Land in particular, there is a lack of information and what is available has been presented mainly in the Russian language. Through a joint collaboration with the Murmansk Marine Biological Institute, a checklist of known distributions of echinoderms in waters around Svalbard and Franz Josef Land archipelagos extending to water depths of 3000 meters has been compiled and made available (Anisimova and Cochrane, 2003).

The project has resulted in a synthesis of available information on echinoderms that includes taxonomic synonyms, characteristic biogeographical and depth distributions of species, and all literature references to all data. This invaluable resource will help to understand the role of both natural and human-related biodiversity changes of a common family of benthic organisms.

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