Anthony's Science Blog

Conference at UVM: Changing seasonality in the Arctic

October 18, 2010 – 1:27 pm

Today I’ve been enjoying attending a small conference at the University of Vermont on the effects of changing seasonality in Arctic ecosystems. The basic issue is that the course of the seasons is changing in the arctic: in addition to warmer temperatures, the length of the warm snow-free summer season is being extended at the beginning and end of the season. In other words, spring is coming earlier and fall is coming later.

This change in seasonality will have far reaching effects on many aspects of the arctic system and we’ve seen presentations addressing effects on soils, streams, tundra, boreal forest, sea ice, and even day-to-day operations of the diamond mining industry. I’ve also learned a lot about the climatic drivers creating the changes.

Here are some of the findings I heard about today and found interesting. Climatological and remote sensing data show that with the retreat of sea ice, we are observing increasing snow and increasing heat anomalies in arctic weather. These are some factors that those of us doing terrestrial ecology may want to pay attention to. There appear to be good correlations between sea ice extent, air temperature, and NDVI (a proxy for plant production), suggesting a relatively deterministic system with mechanisms tractable for study.

At a smaller scale, I presented some information about local-scale plant soil interactions in the tundra. I was interested to see some of the same nutrient cycling issues discussed in talks about streams. One workshop participant pointed out that streams do not appear to show the same trends in NO₃^– that our research group has observed in soils. We tend to see more nutrients available early in the season whereas he said that NO₃^– concentrations tend to go up in streams throughout the summer. I think everyone agreed that it would be cool to try to link these terrestrial and aquatic nutrient dynamics throughout the season.