Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Subarctic Ecosystems: Snow, Frogs, Ponds, and Trees
Subarctic environments are among the fastest warming regions on the planet. This amplified warming is having drastic and rapid impacts on the physical environment and ecological processes.
However, the impacts that we see are not just a consequence of changes in climate, but also depend on the ways in which snow, water, plants and animals interact.
At the northern extent of both the boreal forest and permanently frozen ground, the coastal subarctic ecoregion known as the Hudson Bay Lowlands represents the largest contiguous wetland complex in Canada.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
In this paper, we use research done in the Hudson Bay Lowlands to explore the question of how climate change is affecting terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
In order to answer this question, we use climate change projections to calculate specific indicators which will affect ecosystem processes.
Four illustrative case studies were selected which span a range of interconnected subsystems within the Hudson Bay Lowlands: snow, trees, ponds, and frogs.
We discuss the ways in which these ecosystem processes are sensitive to the direct impacts of climate change; for instance, increases in air and water temperature are associated with increased size and survival of wood frog tadpoles.
We also consider the ways in which these systems are interconnected, and the responses to climate change may be surprising; for instance, changes in the spatial structure vegetation community will influence the snowpack, which is important for maintaining water levels in ponds.
Overall, these findings provide a framework for understanding how complex and interconnected the impacts of climate change on subarctic ecosystems are, and how critical it is to mitigate changes to this sensitive environment.
Read the paper —Snow, ponds, trees, and frogs: how environmental processes mediate climate change impacts on four subarctic terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems by M. Morison, N.J. Casson, S. Mamet, J. Davenport, T. Livingston, L.A. Fishback, H. White, and A. Windsor
