Climate change triggers poleward shifts in species distribution leading to changes in biogeography. In the marine environment, fish respond quickly to warming, causing community-wide reorganizations, which result in profound changes in ecosystem functioning. Functional biogeography provides a framework to address how ecosystem functioning may be affected by climate change over large spatial ...

Host density, host body size and ambient temperature have all been positively associated with increases in parasite infection. However, the relative importance of these factors in shaping long-term parasite population dynamics in wild host populations is unknown due to the absence of long-term studies. Here, we examine long-term drivers of gill lice (Copepoda) infections in Arctic charr (Salmonidae) ...

There is an urgent need to understand and address the risks associated with a warming climate for ecosystems and societies in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. There are major gaps in our understanding of the complex effects of climate change—including extreme events, cascading impacts across ecosystems, and the underlying socioecological dynamics and feedbacks—all of which need collaborative efforts ...

Microbes play a critical role in plant litter decomposition and influence the fate of carbon in rivers and riparian zones. When decomposing low-nutrient plant litter, microbes acquire nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from the environment (i.e., nutrient immobilization), and this process is potentially sensitive to nutrient loading and changing climate. Nonetheless, environmental controls on immobilization ...

Many invasive species are expanding northwards into boreal and subarctic habitats, but research on the factors favoring their establishment in these regions remains limited. In three Swedish lakes we investigated the growth of Elodea canadensis Michx, a highly invasive macrophyte that is spreading northwards in Europe and Alaska. We conducted an in situ growth experiment, maintained for ten months, ...

As temperatures rise, motile species start to redistribute to more suitable areas, potentially affecting the persistence of several resident species and altering biodiversity and ecosystem functions. In the Barents Sea, a hotspot for global warming, marine fish from boreal regions have been increasingly found in the more exclusive Arctic region. Here, we show that this shift in species distribution ...

<ol> <li>Forest clearance is a pervasive disturbance worldwide, but many of its impacts are regarded as transient, diminishing in intensity as forest recovers. However, forests can take decades to centuries to recover after severe disturbances, and temporal lags in recovery of ecosystem properties for different forest habitats are mostly unknown. This includes forest streams, where most studies of ...

Plant litter represents a major basal resource in streams, where its decomposition is partly regulated by litter traits. Litter-trait variation may determine the latitudinal gradient in decomposition in streams, which is mainly microbial in the tropics and detritivore-mediated at high latitudes. However, this hypothesis remains untested, as we lack information on large-scale trait variation for ...

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 ...