Understanding drivers of mercury (Hg) accumulation in freshwater food webs is vital due to its ability to accumulate in organisms and magnify in food webs to potent levels, potentially impacting wildlife and human health. This is of particular concern in regions where fish serve as an important food source. This study explores drivers of Hg accumulation in European perch (Perca fluviatilis) across ...

Blue mussels (Mytilus spp.) are important ecosystem bioengineers and provide numerous of ecosystem services. They are found worldwide, but face a global population decline for unclear reasons in many regions. A pilot study in the subarctic rocky intertidal shore in Northern Norway revealed an unexpected unimodal pattern in the body size of blue mussels along a vertical transect from low to high ...

Methane-cycling is becoming more important in high-latitude ecosystems as global warming makes permafrost organic carbon increasingly available. We explored 387 samples from three high-latitudes regions (Siberia, Alaska and Patagonia) focusing on mineral/organic soils (wetlands, peatlands forest), lake/pond sediment and water. Physicochemical, climatic and geographic variables were integrated ...

Classification of zooplankton to species with broadband echosounder data could increase the taxonomic resolution of acoustic surveys and reduce the dependence on net and trawl samples for ‘ground truthing’. Supervised classification with broadband echosounder data is limited by the acquisition of validated data required to train machine learning algorithms (‘classifiers’). We tested the hypothesis ...

Little is currently known about how climate modulates the relationship between plant diversity and soil organic carbon and the mechanisms involved. Yet, this knowledge is of crucial importance in times of climate change and biodiversity loss. Here, we show that plant diversity is positively correlated with soil carbon content and soil carbon-to-nitrogen ratio across 84 grasslands on six continents ...

The Atlantic Water, entering the Arctic through the Barents Sea and Fram Strait, is the main source of nutrients in the Arctic Ocean. The Barents Sea is divided by the Polar Front into an Atlantic-dominated domain in the south, and an Arctic-dominated domain in the north. The Polar Front is a thermohaline structure, which is topographically-steered at sub-surface, and influenced by the seasonal ...

Permafrost soils store a substantial part of the global soil carbon and nitrogen. However, global warming causes abrupt erosion and gradual thaw, which make these stocks vulnerable to microbial decomposition into greenhouse gases. Here, we investigated the microbial response to abrupt in situ permafrost thaw. We sequenced the total RNA of a 1 m deep soil core consisting of up to 26 500-year-old permafrost ...

The high Arctic is considered a pristine environment compared with many other regions in the northern hemisphere. It is becoming increasingly vulnerable to invasion by invasive alien species (IAS), however, as climate change leads to rapid loss of sea ice, changes in ocean temperature and salinity, and enhanced human activities. These changes are likely to increase the incidence of arrival and ...

Skogens helsetilstand påvirkes i stor grad av klima og værforhold, enten direkte ved tørke, frost og vind, eller indirekte ved at klimaet påvirker omfanget av soppsykdommer og insektangrep. Klimaendringene og den forventede økningen i klimarelaterte skogskader gir store utfordringer for forvaltningen av framtidas skogressurser. Det samme gjør invaderende skadegjørere, både allerede etablerte arter ...

The Barents Sea has been coined ‘the Arctic hotspot’ of climate change due to the rapidity with which environmental changes are taking place. This transitional domain from Atlantic to Arctic waters is home to highly productive benthic communities. This system strongly fluctuates on a seasonal basis in its sympagic-pelagicbenthic coupling interactions, with potential effects on benthic standing ...