Increased sea ice melt alters vertical surface-mixing processes in Arctic seas. More melt water strengthens the stratification, but an absent ice cover also exposes the uppermost part of the water column to wind-induced mixing processes. We conducted a field study in the Barents Sea, an Arctic shelf sea, to examine the effects of stratification and vertical mixing processes on 1) the upward nitrate ...

Light is a major cue for nearly all life on Earth. However, most of our knowledge concerning the importance of light is based on organisms’ response to light during daytime, including the dusk and dawn phase. When it is dark, light is most often considered as pollution, with increasing appreciation of its negative ecological effects. Using an Autonomous Surface Vehicle fitted with a hyperspectral ...

Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) gives the opportunity to carry out research with a re-duced environmental footprint. Unmanned aircraft, including both fixed wing and multi rotor types (helicopters) allow us to collect very high resolution image data for vegetation mapping without the need for any personnel walking into the site and thereby potentially disturbing the sensitive Arctic ecosystems. ...

<ol> <li>Crowdsourced data can provide spatially explicit data on the contribution of nature to people. Spatial information is essential for effectively managing the diverse relationships that people have with nature, but the potential and limits of using crowdsourcing data to generate maps for conservation purposes need further research. </li><p> <p><li>Passive crowdsourcing tools include social ...

Small rodents are a key indicator to understand the effect of rapidly changing winter climate on Arctic tundra ecosystems. However, monitoring rodent populations through the long Arctic winter by means of conventional traps has, until now, been hampered by snow cover and harsh ambient conditions. Here, we conduct the first extensive assessment of the utility of a newly developed camera trap to ...

Following the recent Global Carbon Project (GCP) synthesis of the decadal methane (CH₄ budget over 2000– 2012 (Saunois et al., 2016), we analyse here the same dataset with a focus on quasi-decadal and inter-annual variability in CH₄ emissions. The GCP dataset integrates results from topdown studies (exploiting atmospheric observations within an atmospheric inverse-modelling ...

Population responses to marine climate change are determined by the strength of the selection pressure imposed by changing climate, the genetic variability within the population (i.e., among individuals), and phenotypic plasticity within individuals. Marine climate change research has focused primarily on population-level responses, yet it is at the level of the individual that natural selection ...

Benthic invertebrate communities play a fundamental role in lake ecosystems, and the understanding of how those benthic communities are structured, particularly in terms of the identity and spatiotemporal distribution of their functional traits, is key to our understanding of how lake ecosystems work. In Takvatn, a subarctic lake in northern Norway, we identified the taxonomic and functional identity ...

The ecosystem role of Arctic microbial communities is still largely unknown. Based on a time-series study at the IsA station (West Spitsbergen), the seasonality and contribution of pelagic protists to the vertical flux was investigated at 7 time points during 2011-2012. The hydrography of this high-Arctic fjord was evaluated to identify impacts on the community composition during the different ...

The migratory behaviour of hatchery-reared Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., post-smolts during the first phase of the marine migration was examined to assess their susceptibility to salmon lice, Lepeophtheirus salmonis (Krøyer), infestations. Swimming depths of eight post-smolts relative to the measured salinity and temperature were monitored for an average of 11.4 h following release outside the ...