Journal
NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE
Volume 2, Issue 6, Pages 453-457Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1465
Keywords
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Funding
- Canadian International Polar Year program
- US National Science Foundation
- Australian Research Council
- Department of Sustainability and Environment (Australia)
- National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- ArcticNet (Canada)
- Environment Canada
- Northern Scientific Training program (Canada)
- Polar Continental Shelf program (Canada)
- Yukon Territorial Government (Canada)
- Natural Sciences Division of the Danish Council for Independent Research
- Danish Environmental Protection Agency
- ATANS (EU)
- Academy of Finland
- Icelandic Research Fund
- Environmental Research and Technology Development Fund (Japan)
- Ministry of the Environment (Japan)
- Dutch Polar program
- Research Council of Norway
- Norwegian Svalbard Society
- Norwegian Polar Institute
- European Commission (Norway)
- Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning
- US Long Term Ecological Research program
- US Forest Service
- US Fish and Wildlife Service
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1027341] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Division Of Polar Programs [856516] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP) [1107707, 0856728, 0856853] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP)
- Directorate For Geosciences [0807639, 856628] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Temperature is increasing at unprecedented rates across most of the tundra biome(1). Remote-sensing data indicate that contemporary climate warming has already resulted in increased productivity over much of the Arctic(2,3), but plot-based evidence for vegetation transformation is not widespread. We analysed change in tundra vegetation surveyed between 1980 and 2010 in 158 plant communities spread across 46 locations. We found biome-wide trends of increased height of the plant canopy and maximum observed plant height for most vascular growth forms; increased abundance of litter; increased abundance of evergreen, low-growing and tall shrubs; and decreased abundance of bare ground. Intersite comparisons indicated an association between the degree of summer warming and change in vascular plant abundance, with shrubs, forbs and rushes increasing with warming. However, the association was dependent on the climate zone, the moisture regime and the presence of permafrost. Our data provide plot-scale evidence linking changes in vascular plant abundance to local summer warming in widely dispersed tundra locations across the globe.
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