Marine biodiversity refugia in a climate‐sensitive subarctic shelf

Abstract The subarctic shelf of the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS) is one world's most productive marine environments, exposed to drastic climate changes characterized by extreme fluctuations in temperature, sea ice concentration, timing, and duration. These climatic elicit profound responses species distribution, abundance, community composition. Here, we examined patterns alpha temporal beta diversity 159 taxa (66 vertebrates 93 invertebrate species) from 29 years (1990–2018) observations NOAA bottom trawl surveys EBS. Based on these data, identified geographically distinct refugial zones northern southern regions middle shelf, defined high richness similarity composition over time. harbor higher frequencies occurrence for representative relative outside refugia. We also explored primary environmental factors structuring biodiversity distributions, which underpinned importance winter concentration diversity. spatial distributions between low regimes highlighted contrasting signals. In particular, latter showed elevated compared former. Further, periods an overall increase compositional communities Despite spatiotemporal differences refugia represent safe havens Distinguishing areas can help facilitate conservation management efforts under accelerated ongoing changes.