Roland Pape

University of South-Eastern Norway | USN · Faculty of Technology, Natural Sciences and Maritime Sciences

To predict species' responses to a rapidly changing environment, it is necessary to detect current clines of life-history traits and understand their drivers. We studied body size variation, a key trait in evolutionary biology, of two arctic-alpine lycosid spiders and underlying mechanisms controlling this variation. We used long time-series data o...

To predict species’ responses to a rapidly changing environment, it is necessary to detect current clines of life-history traits and understand their drivers. We studied body size variation, a key trait in evolutionary biology, of two arctic–alpine lycosid spiders and underlying mechanisms controlling this variation. We used long time-series data o...

Arctic-alpine ecosystems are considered hot-spots of environmental change, with rapidly warming conditions causing massive alterations in vegetational structure. These changes and their environmental controls are highly complex and variable across spatial and temporal scales. Yet, despite their numerous implications for the global climate system, t...

Under climate change, cold-adapted alpine ecosystems are turning into hotspots of warming. However, the complexity of driving forces of growth, associated biomass gain and carbon storage of alpine shrubs is poorly understood. We monitored alpine growth mechanisms of six common shrub species across contrasting biomes, Mediterranean and tundra, using...

Considering the recent widespread greening and browning trends associated with shrubs in arctic–alpine ecosystems, further understanding of how these shrubs respond in a rapidly changing environment is of crucial importance. We here monitor shrub growth, using high-precision dendrometers to produce fine-scale intra-annual growth patterns from hour...

Here, we present measurement data of stem diameter variability of three common woody plants, monitored in the Mediterranean-alpine biome for six consecutive years (2015–2020). These focal species (Astragalus granatensis, Cytisus galianoi, and Genista versicolor) are abundant across the Sierra Nevada mountain chain (Southern Spain) and will potentia...

The Arctic, which is from a global perspective to be seen as the ‘last of the wild’, is facing human-induced developments that are increasingly threatening ecosystems’ structure and functioning—with important repercussions on environmental and, subsequently, human health. Its warming at twice the global rate, actually enough of a problem by itself,...

1. Arctic and alpine ecosystems are strongly affected by rapidly changing environmental conditions, resulting in profound vegetation shifts, which are highly heterogeneous and hard to predict, yet have strong global impacts. Shrubs have been identified as a key driver of these shifts. In this study, we aim to improve the understanding of how such b...

Broad‐scale changes in arctic‐alpine vegetation and their global effects have long been recognized and labeled one of the clearest examples of the terrestrial impacts of climate change. Arctic‐alpine dwarf shrubs are a key factor in those processes, responding to accelerated warming in complex and still poorly understood ways. Here, we look closely...

Here, we present fine-scale measurements of stem diameter variation from three common arctic-alpine dwarf-shrub species monitored in two mountain regions of Central Norway. All three species (Betula nana, Empetrum nigrum ssp. hermaphroditum, and Phyllodoce caerulea) are abundant within the studied regions and highly important contributors to potent...

Considering the recent widespread greening associated with dwarf shrubs in arctic and alpine ecosystems, further understanding of how these shrubs respond to environmental conditions is of crucial importance. Here we present novel insights and propose a new method to monitor shrub growth, using high-precision point dendrometers. We analyzed intra-...

Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) once inhabited almost the whole of the European continent. After facing nearly complete extinction about a century ago, they now form a more or less connected metapopulation with eleven broad-scale populations and numerous isolated habitat patches throughout Europe. Increasing public interest and a favourable legislative s...

Woody encroachment is increasingly threatening savanna ecosystems, but it remains unclear how this is driven by different land tenures and management systems. In South Africa, communal land is mainly managed under continuous grazing, while commercial land is under rotational grazing. We hypothesize that woody encroachment has increased since the en...

Within the context of species distribution models, scrutiny arises from the choice of meaningful environmental predictors. Thermal conditions are not the sole driver but are the most widely acknowledged abiotic driver of plant life within alpine ecosystems. We linked long‐term measurements of direct, plant‐relevant, near‐surface temperatures to pla...

Body size is one of the most important individual traits, determining various other life-history traits, including fitness. Both evolutionary and ecological factors shape the body size in arthropods, but the relative contribution of abiotic drivers acting at different spatial scales has been little investigated. We aimed to identify the importance...

Microbial communities in arctic–alpine soils show biogeographic patterns related to elevation, but the effect of fine-scale heterogeneity and possibly related temperature and soil moisture regimes remains unclear. We collected soil samples from different micro-topographic positions and elevational levels in two mountain regions of the Scandes, Cent...

The arctic-alpine biome is warming rapidly, resulting in a gradual replacement of low statured species by taller woody species in many tundra ecosystems. In northwest North America, the remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), suggests an increase in productivity of the arctic and alpine tundra and a decrease in productivity o...

Monitoring lichen-rich vegetation types in central and northern Norway during the last decades has revealed a significant decrease of lichen cover over space and time. The possible reason for such a sharp decline could be the simultaneously increasing populations of reindeer. Despite this ongoing development, little knowledge exists about the exten...

How to assess the spatio-temporal variability of reindeer pastures? What about the actual utilization of pasture resources by reindeer? These topics are addressed as one example of recent landscape ecological research in the new edition of the textbook "landscape ecology" of H. Leser and J. Löffler.

The current greening of arctic-alpine landscapes poses the question about its underlying ecological mechanisms. Given its importance across various contexts and scales, it is vital to understand the drivers of contemporary patterns in phytomass and primary productivity to improve predictions under altered environmental conditions. Here, we analysed...

Due to increasing anthropogenic habitat alteration, fragmentation, and loss, the analysis of how, when, and why animals select particular habitats has become a central issue in ecology and biogeography. Animals adapt to spatiotemporal variability in resources either by tracking these resources or by plasticity in behavior to cover their needs, lead...

Today’s overall challenges of reindeer pastoralism, i.e., pasture degradation, climate change, conflicting land use, and predation as well as the underlying meshwork of ecology, socio-economy, culture, and politics requires further research. Overutilization of pastures, reinforced by their general loss has led to a decrease in body weight of reinde...

There is an obvious need for a better understanding of the drivers of local spatial heterogeneity in alpine phytomass. Facing challenges in scaling relations with data available either at biome-scale or at plot-scale we wanted to disentangle the driving forces behind spatial patterns of phytomass, productivity, and energy content in alpine reindeer...

Climate-driven variability of habitat selection of large herbivores has not yet been explicitly analyzed. To this end, we aimed to better understand the climate-ecological mechanisms behind geographic patterns of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) habitat utilization. Our study area comprised of the ranges of Filefjell Reinlag, southern Norway (...

While striving for “global” species models of habitat selection, spatiotemporal variation in utilization patterns within a particular habitat and intraspecies variation in space use are still poorly understood. We addressed these challenges by exploring habitat use of domesticated reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus), focusing on factors that unde...

Our research addresses questions about how micro-climate affects activity abundance of a common and widespread harvestman in an alpine ecosystem. Activity patterns of the Harvestman Mitopus morio (Fabricius, 1779) were studied along different alpine gradients in the central Norwegian Scandes. Within a nested design, we surveyed 18 alpine habitats w...

Reindeer grazing has been entitled as ecological keystone in arctic-alpine landscapes. In addition, reindeer husbandry is tightly connected to the identity of the indigenous Sámi people in northern Europe. Nowadays, reindeer husbandry is challenged in several ways, of which pasture degradation, climate change, conflicting land uses and predation ar...

Mountain ecosystems are commonly regarded as being highly sensitive to global change. Due to the system complexity and multifaceted interacting drivers, however, understanding current responses and predicting future changes in these ecosystems is extremely difficult. We aim to discuss potential effects of global change on mountain ecosystems and gi...

The functioning of ecosystems is strongly correlated to soil temperature dynamics. Because only a few studies so far have investigated the spatio-temporal variability of alpine soil temperatures, we proceeded to analyze soil temperatures in a heterogeneous alpine landscape by means of a multi-scale approach. We combined vertical soil temperature gr...

In response to the paucity of temperature data for high mountain environments at spatial and temporal resolutions reasonable for ecological modelling, this study evaluated both physically and statistically based modelling (or interpolation) of near-surface temperatures in a high mountain environment at sub-daily time scales and differing spatial sc...

We analyzed diversity patterns of alpine tundra ecosystems along environmental gradients. We hypothesized that alpine diversity is affected by climate at local and regional scales, nutrient availability, soil moisture, and disturbance related to herbivory. In all, 232 samples in 11 study areas in Troms and Finnmark counties were analyzed with regar...

The temperature and soil moisture conditions as well as vegetation patterns were studied to describe the habitat and to model the life cycle of Melanoplus frigidus, a true alpine grasshopper of the Scandes. In the low alpine belt of the Norwegian Scandes the species colonizes only the warmest microhabitats with maximum soil surface temperatures of...

Aim Our main aim is to determine if ring-width variations in Empetrum hermaphroditum reflect regional or local topoclimate signals in an alpine environment. In the case that topoclimate provides the dominant signal, a secondary aim is to link these to spatial distribution patterns of different vegetation types.Location The study area is situated in...

Suplement to Journal Article

The heterogeneity of the Norwegian mountain landscape under investigation led to a multi-scale approach. We combined micro-spatial differentiations within small catchments (micro-scale), altitudinal changes of an oceanic and a continental mountain system (meso-scale), and oceanic-continental alteration between these two mountain regions (macro-scal...

This study aims at improving the comprehension of the alpine treeline, partly as a means of projecting landscape evolution in an anticipated warmer future. The main problem to be solved is to distinguish effects and responses of climate change and human impact, two driving forces which have both caused an increase in the altitude of the alpine tree...

A surface energy balance model (SEB), describing the fluxes of latent and sensible heat as well as the ground heat flux at different surfaces, was developed to simulate substrate, surface and air temperature variations in high mountain landscapes at a high temporal resolution of one hour. Classical atmospheric forcing was imposed at a reference lev...

A modelling approach was practised to characterize the complexity of high mountain ecosystems using a new simple model to simulate near-surface temperature variations. The heterogeneity of the investigated landscape led to an across-scale procedure that combined vertical interactions at single locations (nano-scale), micro-spatial differentiations...

The temporal dynamics of the energy balance within high mountain landscapes are investigated by means of complex measurements and transmitted to small catchment areas for spatial analysis. Throughout the year ecological processes like the distribution of snow during winter, snow melting, freeze-thaw-action, soil temperature dynamics, changes in soi...

The temporal dynamics of the energy balance within high mountain landscapes are investigated by means of complex measurements and transmitted to small catchment areas for spatial analysis. Throughout the year ecological processes like the distribution of snow during winter, snow melting, freeze-thaw-action, soil temperature dynamics, changes in soi...