Catherine Girard

Climate change is causing seasonally ice‐covered lakes of the boreal region to undergo changes in their winter regime by altering patterns of precipitation and temperature, often reflected as reduced snow and ice cover duration. The duration, extent and quality of ice, and snow cover have a pivotal role for production and carbon cycling in lakes in winter, with potentially cascading effects for the following open water period. We investigated under‐ice carbon cycling by assessing bacterial growth (including bacterial production, bacterial respiration, and bacterial growth efficiency) and primary production at five water depths during early winter, midwinter, late winter and melting season in a boreal lake, and report significantly different temporal patterns. Bacterial respiration was dominant in early and midwinter, whereas the late winter and melting season were dominated by bacterial production. Multiple linear regression models indicated that high early winter bacterial respiration was associated with senescing phytoplankton, whereas bacterial production was promoted by the onset of spring processes. Collectively, bacterial growth indices were inherently linked with bacterioplankton community composition and specific biomarker taxa. Primary production under ice increased in late winter when light‐blocking snow cover melted, and primary production measured from the lake ice exceeded that of the water column at the melting season. Ice samples hosted diverse eukaryotic communities including photoautotrophs, suggesting that the habitat potential of the understudied lake ice and the role of ice for ecological processes at ice melt should be further explored.

Arctic climate change is leading to sea-ice attrition in the Last Ice Area along the northern coast of Canada and Greenland, but less attention has been given to the associated land-based ecosystems. Here we evaluated bacterial community structure in a hydrologically coupled cryo-ecosystem in the region: Thores Glacier, proglacial Thores Lake, and its outlet to the sea. Deep amplicon sequencing revealed that Polaromonas was ubiquitous, but differed genetically among diverse niches. Surface glacier-ice was dominated by Cyanobacteria, while the perennially ice-capped, well-mixed water column of Thores Lake had a unique assemblage of Chloroflexi, Actinobacteriota, and Planctomycetota. Species richness increased downstream, but glacier microbes were little detected in the lake, suggesting strong taxonomic sorting. Ongoing climate change and the retreat of Thores Glacier would lead to complete drainage and loss of the lake microbial ecosystem, indicating the extreme vulnerability of diverse cryohabitats and unique microbiomes in the Last Ice coastal margin.