Permafrost is melting faster, plants are blooming at different times and warmer ocean temperatures mean less cold, deep water for certain types of fish. The longer summers and higher temperatures are causing impacts across the Arctic environment.
Scientists say the changes in Arctic weather are fueled by global warming. The trend is continuing this year, and a town in the Russian Arctic recorded a temperature of more than 100 degrees last week for the first time ever. The period between October 2018 and August 2019 was the second-warmest on record in the Arctic, and NOAA's 2019 Arctic Report Card noted remarkably early snowmelt in parts of the region. "Arctic temperatures are currently rising at twice the global average and climate projections indicate that the Arctic will continue to warm at a higher rate than the rest of the globe, which will lead to longer growing seasons," they wrote in the paper.Īverage temperatures in the Arctic rose 5 degrees between 19, according to a report published by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program. Hoye and his fellow researchers noted that the climate at the Zackenberg station has changed significantly in the past two decades. (MORE: Antarctica's Adélie Penguins Are More Successful with Less Sea Ice ) "The large amount of data enables us to show how small animals in the Arctic nature change lives in line with climate change."
#ARCTIC WOLF SPIDER SERIES#
"We now have the longest time series of collected spiders from the Arctic," Toke Hoye, lead author on the study and an Arctic researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, said in a news release. They discovered that, during years with earlier snowmelt, the spiders produced their first clutch earlier and were more likely to have a second clutch. Scientists at the Zackenberg Research Station in Northeast Greenland have been catching and studying the spiders for almost 20 years. Typically, wolf spiders in colder climates have only one batch of eggs, or a clutch, each year. Our results underscore the need for data reporting beyond overall trends in biomass or abundance and for including basic research on life history and ecology to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the sensitivity of Arctic and other arthropods to global changes.Warmer temperatures and an earlier start to spring in the Arctic are leading to a spider baby boom.Įarlier snowpack melt driven by warmer temperatures gives wolf spiders more time to produce more eggs, according to new research published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Together, these data highlight the complexity of characterizing climate change responses even in relatively simple Arctic food webs. Contrary to expectation in this extreme polar environment, winter and fall conditions and positive density-dependent feedbacks were more common determinants of arthropod dynamics than summer temperature. Total abundance masked more complicated trajectories of family-level abundance, which also frequently varied among habitats. Family-level diversity showed the opposite pattern, suggesting increasing dominance of a small number of taxa. Unlike findings from temperate systems, we found a nonlinear pattern, with total arthropod abundance gradually declining during 1996 to 2014, followed by a sharp increase.
#ARCTIC WOLF SPIDER DRIVERS#
We utilized 24 y of abundance data from Zackenberg in High-Arctic Greenland to assess trends in abundance and diversity and identify potential climatic drivers of abundance changes. Clear imprints of climate on the behavior and life history of some Arctic arthropods have been demonstrated, but a synthesis of population-level abundance changes across taxa is lacking. Monitoring data from the Arctic are especially underrepresented, yet critical to uncovering and understanding some of the earliest biological responses to rapid environmental change. However, most arthropod monitoring programs are short-lived and restricted in taxonomic resolution. Time series data on arthropod populations are critical for understanding the magnitude, direction, and drivers of change.
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