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The societal need for—and urgency of obtaining—basic information on the distribution of Arctic marine species and biological communities has dramatically increased in recent decades as facets of the human footprint alter Arctic marine biodiversity. The primary goals of this article are to present updated species inventories based on focused biodiversity research over the last decade, to give examples of emerging recent changes in diversity as indicators of environmental change, and to recommend future diversity-related research areas. Species inventories across all eukaryotic taxonomic levels now total close to 8,000 species, with several thousand additional benthic species predicted to be recorded or discovered in the future. The currently known Arctic species richness estimate includes close to 2,000 phytoplankton taxa, over 1,000 ice-associated protists, greater than 50 ice-associated metazoans, ~ 350 …