Community dynamics in a rapidly warming high Arctic: trophic synchrony in time and space

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2018

End date

12/31/2022

Budget

1,026,558 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The main goal of INSYNC is to improve our understanding of how ecological climate effects influence community dynamics, through trophic interactions and the dynamics of key species. This we achieve by studying the high-arctic tundra community in Svalbard, the fastest warming region of the globe. Importantly, we account for both trophic interactions, density-dependent processes, and age structure fluctuations in our species-specific and multi-species stochastic models. The project has followed the plan, with long research stays abroad (PhD, Postdoc, PI), data collection from a novel field experiment, and analyses of the factors (climate change, trophic interactions) that affect the species' population dynamics, trends, and spatial population synchrony. INSYNC has delivered many media contributions and popular science reports, masters and PhD theses, as well as talks and posters at multiple international conferences and universities. In total 19 peer-reviewed articles have been published so far, contributing not only to a much better understanding of the direct and indirect effects of climate change, but also to our general understanding of ecological processes. Our studies have shown how (1) herbivore food plants are influenced by simulated icing and summer warming; (2) climate effects (notably icing and summer warming), harvest and density dependence affect the reindeer population dynamics, behaviour, population genetics and spatial processes; (3) the barnacle geese population dynamics are affected by climate, density dependence and trophic interactions; and (4) climate change can lead to changes in species? spatial population synchrony, which in turn has implications for extinction risk and the dynamics of other species. The climate change effects turn out to vary even at short distances, which means that spatial variation in the environment and in the populations' responses may contribute to buffer negative impacts of climate change. This is particularly important given the increasing level of population isolation due to reduced sea ice extent, which has increased the genetic differentiation between reindeer populations. By developing multi-species population models we expect that the last year of INSYNC will make ground-breaking contributions to how we understand climate effects, ecosystem processes and community dynamics in stochastic environments in general, and Arctic tundra ecosystems in particular.