Descrizione The Arctic cryosphere is changing rapidly. Accelerated melt of the Greenland ice sheet, increased runoff from Arctic glaciers, diminishing sea ice have profound impacts on coastal environments of the North. In marine process studies, the knowledge of a phenomenon depends on observations, which are usually extremely complexes because of the intrinsic difficulty of the type of measurements that have to be made. These issues are specifically urgent and strategic for coastal polar areas, that present an extremely high spatial-temporal variability. Seasonal and interannual variability of the zooplankton composition and abundance will be studied in long-time series of sediment trap samples. Zooplanktonic community data will be integrated with in situ oceanographic, biogeochemical and satellite data to describe the local physical dynamics and biogeochemical processes, and to provide evolutional trends on a large time scale. Zooplankton groups and abundance analysis will be studied to understand the temporal distribution of zooplankton biomass in coastal waters and to evaluate the zooplankton characterization, abundance and dynamics using 10-year time series sediment trap samples.