0000000000656557
AUTHOR
Jon Moen
Experimental evidence of the long‐term effects of reindeer on Arctic vegetation greenness and species richness at a larger landscape scale
1. Large herbivores influence plant community structure and ecosystem processes in many ecosystems. In large parts of the Arctic, reindeer (or caribou) are the only large herbivores present. Recent studies show that reindeer have the potential to mitigate recent warming-induced shrub encroachment in the Arctic and the associated greening of high-latitude ecosystems. This will potentially have large scale consequences for ecosystem productivity and carbon cycling. 2. To date, information on variation in the interactions between reindeer and plants across Arctic landscapes has been scarce. We utilized a network of experimental sites across a latitudinal gradient in the Scandinavian mountains …
High rates of short-term dynamics of forest ecosystem services
Currently, the main tools for assessing and managing ecosystem services at large scales are maps providing snapshots of their potential supply. However, many ecosystems change over short timescales; thus, such maps soon become inaccurate. Here we show high rates of short-term dynamics of three key forest ecosystem services: wood production, bilberry production and topsoil carbon storage. Almost 85% of the coldspots and 65% of the hotspots for these services had changed into a different state over a ten-year period. Wood production showed higher rates of short-term dynamics than bilberry production and carbon storage. The high rates of dynamics mean that static snapshot ecosystem service map…
Data from the study: Strong temporal dynamics of ecosystem services through succession
We used a nation-wide forest dataset from the Swedish National Forest Inventory (NFI) and the Survey of Forest Soils and Vegetation, covering an area of 400,000 km2 of production forests. The inventory uses a regular sampling grid with a randomly selected starting point covering the whole country, with each tract being surveyed once every 5 years. The tracts, which are rectangular in shape and are of different dimensions in different parts of the country, consists of 8 (in the north) to 4 (in the south) circular sample plots. The circular plots have different radii (5-20 meters) to ensure that the variables recorded characterize the ongoing forest dynamics and management. We used only plots…