Five scenarios for the future of Antarctic life

A team of Australian and international researchers have predicted five possible outcomes for how Antarctic life will fare under future conditions.

Antarctica has 2100 known terrestrial plants and animals, living mostly in its ice-free regions, which cover less than 1% of the continent. The extreme cold, dry, isolated and windy conditions that Antarctic species — such as penguins, moss and microbes — are adapted to have made the continent difficult for scientists to access — limiting the data available to forecast future change.

Less than 1% percent of Antarctica is ice-free. Credit: Madison Farrant.

This is according to Monash University researcher Professor Melodie McGeoch from Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future (SAEF), who has led research published in Nature Biodiversity Reviews (doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00113-1) that looks into the future, considering five ecological processes and encroaching changes that prompt thoughts of “what if”. Such thoughts include climate change, disease (eg, H5N1 bird flu), invasive species, land-use changes (eg, building research stations) and pollution.

Adelie penguin and chick. Credit: Madison Farrant.

“Rather than saying we need more data, we used what we already know about the five core ecological processes that shape biodiversity and applied these ideas to the Antarctic context,” McGeoch explained. “This helped us develop five possible outcomes for how life across the continent is likely to respond to climate change and other environmental pressures.”

Gentoo penguins. Credit: Madison Farrant.

The team’s five ecological processes were abiotic filtering (physical conditions which impact survival, such as water availability), dispersal (ability to reach new habitats), adaptation (ability to evolve), biotic interaction (interactions between lifeforms, such as predator–prey relationships) and stochasticity (loss of life due to unpredictable events, such as heatwaves).

Antarctic moss and Antarctic hairgrass. Credit: Steven Chown.

The five scenarios for future Antarctic life the team came up with were:

1. Constrained — where cold, dry, isolated and windy conditions will continue to limit Antarctic life;
2. Dynamic — where species’ ability to spread to new ice-free areas and the ability of invasive species to arrive and establish will be limited by isolation;
3. Diversifying — where new species arrivals will enrich life on the continent and its surrounding islands, and Antarctic species will adapt to new conditions, such as warmer temperatures and larger ice-free areas;
4. Interactive — where through a release from physical constraints such as cold and dry conditions, diversity and frequency of species interactions will increase as will complexity of Antarctic biodiversity; and
5. Disordered — where local losses of many species and a decline in biodiversity will be caused by extreme events such as flooding and heatwaves.

“Antarctica will continue to be cold, dry, windy and isolated, and this will slow the response of life on the continent to otherwise changing conditions,” McGeoch said. “At the same time, how species adapt to change, the unpredictable nature of extreme events, and the complexity of species interactions mean that the response of Antarctic life will vary across the region.”

McGeoch added: “Looking for evidence of these emerging scenarios and predicting where in the region each is most likely will fast-track our understanding of its future.”

Antarctic snow algae. Credit: Steven Chown.

To help clarify the picture of the future for Antarctic life, knowledge gaps are identified by the team, with recommendations for priority further research and monitoring. These include better understanding of how far and how often species move across the region, their capacity to adapt, where new species are most likely to arrive, and how communities are responding to extreme events.

Top image: Two skuas. Credit: Madison Farrant.