Category: projects

Arctic tundra ecosystems are changing fast. The cumulative pressures of accelerated warming, land use and demographic and economic tensions impose a circumpolar research effort as well as the integration of a wide range of methodological approaches. Supported by an Arctic Research Studies mobility grant, we aim at establishing a formal collaboration between the University of Oslo, NTNU University Museum and the Agricultural University of Iceland, through the submission of two common research proposals and a postdoctoral fellowship application to investigate plant-herbivore interactions at a pan-Arctic scale. Our collaboration brings highly complementary skillsets as well as a strong international collaboration effort through the Herbivory Network, the Nordic Borealization Network (NordBorN) and the PIECEMEAL network to reinforce Norwegian-Icelandic cooperation in the field of Arctic research.

This project is funded by the Arctic Research and Studies programme awarded to Stefaniya Kamenova, Isabel C Barrio, Mathilde Defourneaux and James Speed.

As part of the project, in early June 2024 project participants met in Oslo and held an open half-day seminar on Arctic herbivory at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the Department of Biosciences of the University of Oslo.

Tundra ecosystems are changing fast in response to ongoing climate change and increased human pressures linked to land use changes. One derived phenomenon from these impacts is the northward shift in the distribution of species from southern latitudes, a process known as borealization. While borealization trends have long been recognized in marine Arctic ecosystems, few local studies have investigated parallel trends in terrestrial plant communities, and to date there are no assessments of biome-scale plant borealization. Using existing plot-level vegetation data from the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX+) network, this project will quantify plant borealization at a pan-Arctic scale and identify the main drivers contributing to this phenomenon. Specifically, we will measure to which extent borealization has already occurred, assess where borealization of plant communities is more likely to occur, and identify which plant species are more likely to drive borealization patterns.

This project is partly funded by a NERC UK-Iceland Arctic Science Partnership Scheme awarded to Mariana Garcia Criado and Isabel C Barrio. This project is a contribution to the CHARTER project funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme (grant agreement nr. 869471).