Molecular Footprints of Quaternary Climate Fluctuations in the Circumpolar Tundra Shrub Dwarf Birch.

The Arctic tundra biome is undergoing rapid shrub expansion ('shrubification') in response to anthropogenic climate change. During the previous ~2.6 million years, glacial cycles caused substantial shifts in Arctic vegetation, leading to changes in species' distributions, abundance and connectivity, which have left lasting impacts on the genetic structure of modern populations.

Capturing seasonal variations in faecal nutrient content from tundra herbivores using near infrared reflectance spectroscopy.

Herbivores contribute to nutrient cycling in tundra ecosystems through their waste (e.g., faeces, urine).

Long-term trends in global flowering phenology.

Flowering phenology is an indicator of the impact of climate change on natural systems. Anthropogenic climate change has progressed over more than two centuries, but ecological studies are mostly short in comparison. Here we harness the large-scale digitization of herbaria specimens to investigate temporal trends in flowering phenology at a global scale.

The trophic distribution of biomass in ecosystems with co-occurring wildlife and livestock.

Trophic interactions regulate populations, but anthropogenic processes influence primary productivity and consumption by both herbivore and carnivore species. Trophic ecology studies often focus on natural systems such as protected areas, even though livestock globally comprise the majority of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Here we explore spatial and temporal patterns in the distribution of biomass between plants, and large herbivores and carnivores (> 10 kg) in Norwegian rangelands, including both wildlife and livestock.

A regionally coherent ecological fingerprint of climate change, evidenced from natural history collections.

Climate change has dramatic impacts on ecological systems, affecting a range of ecological factors including phenology, species abundance, diversity, and distribution. The breadth of climate change impacts on ecological systems leads to the occurrence of fingerprints of climate change. However, climate fingerprints are usually identified across broad geographical scales and are potentially influenced by publication biases.

What evidence exists for temporal variability in Arctic terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity throughout the Holocene? A systematic map protocol.

Background: The Arctic tundra is subject to the greatest climate change-induced temperature rises of any biome. Both terrestrial and freshwater biota are responding to recent climate warming through variability in their distribution, abundance, and richness. However, uncertainty arises within models of future change when considering processes that operate over centennial timescales.

Legacy effects of herbivory on treeline dynamics along an elevational gradient.

Treelines are expected to expand into alpine ecosystems with global warming, but herbivory may delay this expansion. This study quantifies long-term effects of temporally varying sheep densities on birch recruitment and growth in the treeline ecotone. We examined treeline ecotone successional trajectories and legacy effects in a replicated experimental setup, where enclosures were present for 14 years with three different sheep densities (0, 25, 80 sheep km).

What are the effects of herbivore diversity on tundra ecosystems? A systematic review protocol.

Background: Changes in the diversity of herbivore communities can strongly influence the functioning of northern ecosystems. Different herbivores have different impacts on ecosystems because of differences in their diets, behaviour and energy requirements. The combined effects of different herbivores can in some cases compensate each other but lead to stronger directional changes elsewhere.

Impacts of roads on bird species richness: A meta-analysis considering road types, habitats and feeding guilds.

Roadsides can harbour remarkable biodiversity; thus, they are increasingly considered as habitats with potential for conservation value. To improve construction and management of roadside habitats with positive effects on biodiversity, we require a quantitative understanding of important influential factors that drive both positive and negative effects of roads. We conducted meta-analyses to assess road effects on bird communities.

Will borealization of Arctic tundra herbivore communities be driven by climate warming or vegetation change?

Poleward shifts in species distributions are expected and frequently observed with a warming climate. In Arctic ecosystems, the strong warming trends are associated with increasing greenness and shrubification. Vertebrate herbivores have the potential to limit greening and shrub advance and expansion on the tundra, posing the question of whether changes in herbivore communities could partly mediate the impacts of climate warming on Arctic tundra.

Cool as a moose: How can browsing counteract climate warming effects across boreal forest ecosystems?

Herbivory has potential to modify vegetation responses to climatic changes. However, climate and herbivory also affect each other, and rarely work in isolation from other ecological factors, such as plant-plant competition. Thus, it is challenging to predict the extent to which herbivory can counteract, amplify, or interact with climate impacts on ecosystems.

Urban aliens and threatened near-naturals: Land-cover affects the species richness of alien- and threatened species in an urban-rural setting.

Urbanisation has strong effects on biodiversity patterns, but impacts vary among species groups and across spatial scales. From a local biodiversity management perspective, a more general understanding of species richness across taxonomic groups is required. This study aims to investigate how fine-scale land-cover variables influence species richness patterns of locally threatened and alien species.

SoilTemp: A global database of near-surface temperature.

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.

Herbivory and climate as drivers of woody plant growth: Do deer decrease the impacts of warming?

Vegetation at ecotone transitions between open and forested areas is often heavily affected by two key processes: climate change and management of large herbivore densities. These both drive woody plant state shifts, determining the location and the nature of the limit between open and tree or shrub-dominated landscapes. In order to adapt management to prevailing and future climate, we need to understand how browsing and climatic factors together affect the growth of plants at biome borders.

Long-term changes in northern large-herbivore communities reveal differential rewilding rates in space and time.

Herbivores have important impacts on ecological and ecosystem dynamics. Population density and species composition are both important determinants of these impacts. Large herbivore communities are shifting in many parts of the world driven by changes in livestock management and exploitation of wild populations.

No genetic erosion after five generations for Impatiens glandulifera populations across the invaded range in Europe.

Background: The observation that many alien species become invasive despite low genetic diversity has long been considered the 'genetic paradox' in invasion biology. This paradox is often resolved through the temporal buildup genetic diversity through multiple introduction events. These temporal dynamics in genetic diversity are especially important for annual invasive plants that lack a persistent seed bank, for which population persistence is strongly dependent on consecutive seed 're-establishment' in each growing season.

Can mowing restore boreal rich-fen vegetation in the face of climate change?

Low-frequency mowing has been proposed to be an effective strategy for the restoration and management of boreal fens after abandonment of traditional haymaking. This study investigates how mowing affects long-term vegetation change in both oceanic and continental boreal rich-fen vegetation. This will allow evaluation of the effectiveness of mowing as a management and restoration tool in this ecosystem in the face of climate change.

Plant functional trait change across a warming tundra biome.

The tundra is warming more rapidly than any other biome on Earth, and the potential ramifications are far-reaching because of global feedback effects between vegetation and climate. A better understanding of how environmental factors shape plant structure and function is crucial for predicting the consequences of environmental change for ecosystem functioning. Here we explore the biome-wide relationships between temperature, moisture and seven key plant functional traits both across space and over three decades of warming at 117 tundra locations.

Contrasting spatial, temporal and environmental patterns in observation and specimen based species occurrence data.

Species occurrence data records the location and time of an encounter with a species, and is valuable for many aspects of ecological and evolutionary analyses. A key distinction within species occurrence data is between (1) collected and preserved specimens that can be taxonomically validated (i.e.

Sheep grazing in the North Atlantic region: A long-term perspective on environmental sustainability.

Sheep grazing is an important part of agriculture in the North Atlantic region, defined here as the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Scotland. This process has played a key role in shaping the landscape and biodiversity of the region, sometimes with major environmental consequences, and has also been instrumental in the development of its rural economy and culture. In this review, we present results of the first interdisciplinary study taking a long-term perspective on sheep management, resource economy and the ecological impacts of sheep grazing, showing that sustainability boundaries are most likely to be exceeded in fragile environments where financial support is linked to the number of sheep produced.

Local temperatures inferred from plant communities suggest strong spatial buffering of climate warming across Northern Europe.

Recent studies from mountainous areas of small spatial extent (<2500 km(2) ) suggest that fine-grained thermal variability over tens or hundreds of metres exceeds much of the climate warming expected for the coming decades. Such variability in temperature provides buffering to mitigate climate-change impacts. Is this local spatial buffering restricted to topographically complex terrains? To answer this, we here study fine-grained thermal variability across a 2500-km wide latitudinal gradient in Northern Europe encompassing a large array of topographic complexities.