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Arctic climate shifts drive rapid ecosystem responses across the West Greenland landscape

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posted on 2019-06-21, 13:54 authored by Jasmine E. Saros, Nicholas John Anderson, Stephen Juggins, Suzanne McGowan, Jacob C. Yde, Jon Telling, Joanna BullardJoanna Bullard, Marian L. Yallop, Adam J. Heathcote, Benjamin T. Burpee, Rachel A. Fowler, Chris D. Barry, Robert M. Northington, Christopher L. Osburn, Sergi Pla-Rabes, Sebastian H. Mernild, Erika J. Whiteford, M. Grace Andrews, Jeff Kerby, Eric Post
Prediction of high latitude response to climate change is hampered by poor understanding of the role of nonlinear changes in ecosystem forcing and response. While the effects of nonlinear climate change are often delayed or dampened by internal ecosystem dynamics, recent warming events in the Arctic have driven rapid environmental response, raising questions of how terrestrial and freshwater systems in this region may shift in response to abrupt climate change. We quantified environmental responses to recent abrupt climate change in West Greenland using long-term monitoring and paleoecological reconstructions. Using >40 years of weather data, we found that after 1994, mean June air temperatures shifted 2.2ºC higher and mean winter precipitation doubled from 21 to 40 mm; since 2006, mean July air temperatures shifted 1.1ºC higher. Nonlinear environmental responses occurred with or shortly after these abrupt climate shifts, including increasing ice sheet discharge, increasing dust, advancing plant phenology, and in lakes, earlier ice out and greater diversity of algal functional traits. Our analyses reveal rapid environmental responses to nonlinear climate shifts, underscoring the highly responsive nature of Arctic ecosystems to abrupt transitions.

Funding

US National Science Foundation (grant nos. 1203434, 1144423, 1525636, 1107381, and 0902125) and UK Natural Environmental Research Council (nos. NE/K000349/1 and NE/G019622/1). Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Environmental Research Letters

Citation

SAROS, J.E. ... et al, 2019. Arctic climate shifts drive rapid ecosystem responses across the West Greenland landscape. Environmental Research Letters, 14 (7), 074027.

Publisher

IOP Publishing (© The Authors)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2019-06-12

Publication date

2019-07-16

Notes

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

eISSN

1748-9326

Language

  • en

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