Aim: Greenland is one of the places on Earth where the effects of climate change are most evident. The retreat of sea ice has made East Greenland more accessible for longer periods during the year. East Greenland fjords have been notoriously difficult to study due to their remoteness, dense sea ice conditions and lack of infrastructure. As a result, biological monitoring across latitudinal gradients is scarce in East Greenland and relies on sporadic research cruises and trawl data from commercial vessels. We here aim to investigate the transition in fish and marine mammal communities from South to Northeast Greenland using environmental DNA (eDNA).

Location: South to Northeast Greenland.

Methods: We investigated the transition in fish and marine mammal communities from South to Northeast Greenland using eDNA metabarcoding of seawater samples. We included both surface and mesopelagic samples, collected over approximately 2400 km waterway distance, by sampling from Cape Farewell to Ella Island in August 2021.

Results: We demonstrate a clear transition in biological communities from south to northeast, with detected fish and mammal species matching known distributions. Samples from the southern areas were dominated by capelin (Mallotus villotus) and redfish (Sebastes), whereas northeastern samples were dominated by polar cod (Boreogadus saida), sculpins (Myoxocephalus) and ringed seal (Pusa hispida). We provide newly generated 12S rRNA barcodes from 72 fish species, bringing the public DNA database closer to full taxonomic coverage for Greenlandic fish species for this locus.

Main conclusions: Our results demonstrate that eDNA sampling can detect latitudinal shifts in marine biological communities of the Arctic region, which can supplement traditional fish surveys in understanding species distributions and community compositions of marine vertebrates. Importantly, sampling of eDNA can be a feasible approach for detecting northward range expansions in remote areas as climate change progresses.

This dataset represents environmental DNA sequencing data from a marine research cruise from South to Northeast Greenland during August 2021. Samples were collected at 29 stations in surface waters and mesopelagic waters. See connected publication for additional details.

DNA has been amplified with the primers Tele02 and Elas02 simultaneously. Primers consist of the forward primers Tele02_F (5’-AAACTCGTGCCAGCCACC-3’) and Elas02_F (5’-GTTGGTHAATCTCGTGCCAGC-3’) and the reverse primers Tele02_R (5’-GGGTATCTAATCCCAGTTTG-3’) and Elas02_R (5’-CATAGTAGGGTATCTAATCCTAGTTTG-3’), targeting a 163-185 bp fragment of 12S. The libraries have been sequenced using paired end NovaSeq 6000 sequencing (150 BP PE).

The data consists of 12 sequencing libraries, but has here been split into 24 libraries to demultiplex Tele02 and Elas02 reads separately. All suffixes ending in 1 to 4 represent Tele02, whereas all suffixes ending in 5 to 8 represent Elas02. Please see README_file.txt for additional usage notes. Within each library, there are seawater samples ("KR21StXXX") and sequenced control samples (i.e. CNEs, NTCs, FBs, BBs).

The ”tags” files include the sample name followed by the PCR replicate number (again, 5-8 refer to Elas02 primers but they were amplified in the same tubes as 1-4). The two following columns represent the tags used for each sample (both forward and reverse primer were tagged). Tags are consistent across PCR replicates.

If you want to follow the exact filtering and data analysis done in the study, we refer to the manuscript for further details. If you have any questions, feel free to send an email with any questions you may have.