Elina Kaarlejärvi

University of Helsinki | HY · Research Centre for Ecological Change

Climate change is resulting in a rapid expansion of shrubs in the Arctic. This expansion has been shown to be reinforced by positive feedbacks, and it could thus set the ecosystem on a trajectory towards an alternate, more productive regime. Herbivores, on the other hand, are known to counteract the effects of simultaneous climate warming on shrub...

Herbivory and nutrient limitation can increase the resistance of temperature-limited systems to invasions under climate warming. We imported seeds of lowland species to tundra under factorial treatments of warming, fertilization, herbivore exclusion and biomass removal. We show that warming alone had little impact on lowland species, while exclusio...

Warm‐adapted low elevation plants are expected to exhibit considerable range shifts to higher altitudes and latitudes as a result of climate warming and increased nutrient loads. However, empirical studies show that the magnitude and direction of plant responses are highly species‐ and site‐specific, suggesting that several additional drivers inter...

Recent studies have shown that biotic interactions can shape species’ distributions, but empirical data on multiple biotic interactions are scarce. Therefore, we examined effects of plant–plant and plant–herbivore interactions on plant survival, growth and reproduction at different altitudes. For these purposes we conducted a factorial neighbor rem...

Arctic tundra currently stores half of the global soil carbon (C) stock(1). Climate warming in the Arctic may lead to accelerated CO2 release through enhanced decomposition and turn Arctic ecosystems from a net C sink into a net C source, if warming enhances decomposition more than plant photosynthesis(2). A large portion of the circumpolar Arctic...

Background Changes in the diversity of herbivore communities can strongly influence the functioning of northern ecosystems. Different herbivores have different impacts on ecosystems because of differences in their diets, behaviour and energy requirements. The combined effects of different herbivores can in some cases compensate each other but lead...

Climate change is leading to a species redistributions. In the tundra biome, many shrub species are expanding into new areas, a process known as shrubification. However, not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species (those projected to expand and contract their ranges, and/or those that have increased or decreased...

The Arctic is warming at an alarming rate. While changes in plant community composition and phenology have been extensively reported, the effects of climate change on reproduction remain poorly understood. We quantified multidecadal changes in flower density for nine tundra plant species at a low- and a high-arctic site in Greenland. We found subst...

Seed limitation can narrow down the number of coexisting plant species and limit plant community productivity. It is also likely to constrain community responses to changing environmental and biotic conditions. In a 10-year full-factorial experiment of seed addition, fertilisation, warming and herbivore exclusion, we tested how seed addition alters...

Spatial variation in plant chemical defence towards herbivores can help us understand variation in herbivore top–down control of shrubs in the Arctic and possibly also shrub responses to global warming. Less defended, non‐resinous shrubs could be more influenced by herbivores than more defended, resinous shrubs. However, sparse field measurements l...

Climate change is a pervasive threat to biodiversity. While range shifts are a known consequence of climate warming contributing to regional community change, less is known about how species’ positions shift within their climatic niches. Furthermore, whether the relative importance of different climatic variables prompting such shifts varies with c...

Identifying the ecological processes underlying community assembly remains an elusive goal in community ecology. We formalize assembly hypotheses as alternative models and apply each to predict 1,918 out-of-sample boreal forest understory communities to identify and separate the processes driving community assembly. Models are specified within a Ba...

Background Herbivores modify the structure and function of tundra ecosystems. Understanding their impacts is necessary to assess the responses of these ecosystems to ongoing environmental changes. However, the effects of herbivores on plants and ecosystem structure and function vary across the Arctic. Strong spatial variation in herbivore effects i...

Aim Land use is the foremost cause of global biodiversity decline, but species do not respond equally to land-use practices. Instead, it is suggested that responses vary with species traits, but long-term data on the trait-mediated effects of land use on communities are scarce. Here we study how forest understorey communities have been affected by...

Vegetation properties of arctic tundra vary dramatically across its full latitudinal extent, yet few studies have quantified tundra ecosystem properties across latitudinal gradients with field-based observations that can be related to remotely sensed proxies. Here we present data from field sampling of six locations along the Eurasia Arctic Transec...

Aim The diversity and composition of natural communities are rapidly changing due to anthropogenic disturbances. Magnitude of this compositional reorganization varies across the globe, but reasons behind the variation remain largely unknown. Disturbances induce temporal turnover by stimulating species colonizations, causing local extinctions, alter...

Variation in intraspecific traits is one important mechanism that can allow plant species to respond to global changes. Understanding plant trait responses to environmental changes such as grazing patterns, nutrient enrichment and climate warming is, thus, essential for predicting the composition of future plant communities. We measured traits of e...

The circumpolar Arctic is currently facing multiple global changes that have the potential to alter the capacity of tundra soils to store carbon. Yet, predicting changes in soil carbon is hindered by the fact that multiple factors simultaneously control processes sustaining carbon storage and we do not understand how they act in concert. Here, we i...

Aim Plant functional groups are widely used in community ecology and earth system modelling to describe trait variation within and across plant communities. However, this approach rests on the assumption that functional groups explain a large proportion of trait variation among species. We test whether four commonly used plant functional groups rep...

Appendix S1. Geological setting of the Yamal Peninsula. Appendix S2. Typical plot layout. Appendix S3. Eurasia Arctic Transect location and site descriptions. Appendix S4. Eurasia Arctic Transect species cover‐abundance data. Appendix S5. Eurasia Arctic Transect environmental data. Appendix S6. Full synoptic table. Appendix S7. Diagnostic, co...

Motivation: The Tundra Trait Team (TTT) database includes field‐based measurements of key traits related to plant form and function at multiple sites across the tundra biome. This dataset can be used to address theoretical questions about plant strategy and trade‐offs, trait–environment relationships and environmental filtering, and trait variation...

The tundra is warming more rapidly than any other biome on Earth, and the potential ramifications are far-reaching because of global feedback effects between vegetation and climate. A better understanding of how environmental factors shape plant structure and function is crucial for predicting the consequences of environmental change for ecosystem...

Questions How do plant communities on zonal loamy vs. sandy soils vary across the full maritime Arctic bioclimate gradient? How are plant communities of these areas related to existing vegetation units of the European Vegetation Classification? What are the main environmental factors controlling the transitions of vegetation along the bioclimate gr...

The above mentioned article was originally scheduled for publication in the special issue on Ecology of Tundra Arthropods with guest editors Toke T. Høye . Lauren E. Culler. Erroneously, the article was published in Polar Biology, Volume 40, Issue 11, November, 2017. The publisher sincerely apologizes to the guest editors and the authors for the in...

The original version of this Article contained errors in Figure 2. The dark green symbols on the scatter plot were light green, and vice versa. These errors have now been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Chronic, low intensity herbivory by invertebrates, termed background herbivory, has been understudied in tundra, yet its impacts are likely to increase in a warmer Arctic. The magnitude of these changes is however hard to predict as we know little about the drivers of current levels of invertebrate herbivory in tundra. We assessed the intensity of...

Climate warming is altering the diversity of plant communities but it remains unknown which species will be lost or gained under warming, especially considering interactions with other factors such as herbivory and nutrient availability. Here, we experimentally test effects of warming, mammalian herbivory and fertilization on tundra species richnes...

Temperature is increasing in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. The frequency and nature of precipitation events are also predicted to change in the future. These changes in climate are expected, together with increasing human pressures, to have significant impacts on Arctic and sub-Arctic species and ec...

Data source and sampling method of reindeer abundance time series. (DOCX)

Number of years of available population abundance (N) and period of available data (Y, years) for each of the 19 reindeer populations we analyzed. (DOCX)

Pearson correlation coefficient values indicating synchrony among reindeer population growth rates. (DOCX)

Mountain crowberry (Empetrum nigrum ssp. hermaphroditum) is a keystone species in northern ecosystems and exerts important ecosystem-level effects through high concentrations of phenolic metabolites. It has not been investigated how crowberry phenolics will respond to global climate change. In the tundra, grazing by reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) aff...

Tundra vegetation is responding rapidly to on-going climate warming. The changes in plant abundance and chemistry might have cascading effects on tundra food webs, but an integrated understanding of how the responses vary between habitats and across environmental gradients is lacking. We assessed responses in plant abundance and plant chemistry to...

We studied the interannual variation of late summer snow covered area (SCA), i.e. snowbeds and permanent snow patches, in northern Finland and analyzed the role of topographical factors and climatic conditions on the recent and future occurrence of summer snow. SCA for the years 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2009 was derived from Landsat images using a norm...

Snowbeds and snow patches are characteristic features of arctic and alpine regions and are classified as endangered habitats due to the warming climate. We studied interannual variation of late summer snow cover and the factors affecting it in sub-arctic Enontekiö Lapland, northwestern Finland in years 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2009. Snow cover at 30 m...

The Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia is undergoing some of the most rapid land-cover and land-use changes in the Arctic due to a combination of gas development, reindeer herding, and climate change. Unusual geological conditions (nutrient-poor sands, massive ground ice and extensive landslides) exacerbate the impacts. These changes will likely...

Analyses of vegetation properties along climatic gradients provide first order approximations as to how vegetation might respond to a temporally dynamic climate. Until recently, no systematic study of tundra vegetation had been conducted along bioclimatic transects that represent the full latitudinal extent of the arctic tundra biome. Since 1999, w...

Tundra ecosystems are vulnerable to hydrocarbon development, in part because small-scale, low-intensity disturbances can affect vegetation, permafrost soils, and wildlife out of proportion to their spatial extent. Scaling up to include human residents, tightly integrated arctic social-ecological systems (SESs) are believed similarly susceptible to...

Question: How does willow-characterised tundra vegetation of western Eurasia vary, and what are the main vegetation types? What are the ecological gradients and climatic regimes underlying vegetation differentiation? Location: The dataset was collected across a wide spectrum of tundra habitats at 12 sites in subarctic and arctic areas spanning from...

The causes of a greening trend detected in the Arctic using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) are still poorly understood. Changes in NDVI are a result of multiple ecological and social factors that affect tundra net primary productivity. Here we use a 25 year time series of AVHRR-derived NDVI data (AVHRR: advanced very high resolut...

The Yamal Peninsula in northwest Siberia is undergoing some of the most rapid land-cover and land-use changes in the Arctic due to a combination of gas development, reindeer herding, and climate change. Unusual geological condi-tions (nutrient-poor sands, massive ground ice and extensive landslides) exacerbate the impacts. These changes will likely...

The overarching goal of the Yamal portion of the Greening of the Arctic project is to examine how the terrain and anthropogenic factors of reindeer herding and resource development combined with the climate variations on the Yamal Peninsula affect the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation change and how these changes are in turn affecting tra...