Designing an improved network of long-term monitoring sites for arctic vertebrates

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2015

End date

12/31/2018

Budget

99,630 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

TAMANI?s objectives were to assess the needs of stakeholders in pan-arctic monitoring of seabirds and terrestrial vertebrates, and suggest ways to improve existing monitoring programs. We first used semi-structured stakeholder interviews to ascertain the priorities of stakeholders for arctic monitoring. We published two papers based on these interviews, one on triage ? diverting resources away from species very likely to go extinct in favor of species where monitoring can contribute most ? and one on the integration of monitoring outcomes. In the first paper, we showed that most participants were opposed to triage, that triage conflicted with their system-based view of the Arctic environment, and that scenarios of possible trajectories may represent an effective means of identifying monitoring needs. In the second paper, we showed that there was little integration of monitoring outcomes linked to the monitoring process itself (such as education or dissemination) and the objectives of monitoring (such as detecting changes and making decisions). A better integration of monitoring stakeholders will help connect these outcomes for effective ecosystem stewardship. The project also used spatial analysis of current monitoring locations across the arctic to identify gaps in monitoring and how well drivers are change and ecological conditions are represented across current monitoring networks. Our long-term objective is to use this information to make recommendations concerning future pan-arctic monitoring to meet multiple stakeholder needs. These results would then be then disseminated both to the scientific community and to a wide variety of stakeholders. For this goal, we have compared the environmental characteristics of monitoring sites of seabirds to a circumpolar list of known seabird colonies. Our analysis shows large gaps in some Arctic regions (e.g. the cold Russian Arctic), whereas others such as the mild NE Atlantic are well covered. Such results are not surprising, but by adding variables such as primary sea productivity, we were able to refine a monitoring design that would be more representative of environmental conditions experienced by Arctic seabirds. ?