Vegetation indices are corner stones in vegetation monitoring. However, previous field studies on lichens and NDVI have been based on passive sensors. Active handheld sensors, with their own light sources, enables high- precision monitoring under variable ambient conditions. We investigated the use of handheld sensor NDVI for monitoring pale lichen cover across three study sites from boreal heathlands ...

1. Actuarial senescence, the decline of survival with age, is well documented in the wild. Rates of senescence vary widely between taxa, to some extent also between sexes, with the fastest life histories showing the highest rates of senescence. Few studies have investigated differences in senescence among populations of the same species, although such variation is expected from population-level ...

Acanthobdellida gnaw into the sides of salmonid fishes in frigid Arctic lakes and rivers, latching on with fearsome facial hooks. Sister to leeches, they are an ancient lineage with two described species. Unfortunately, Acanthobdellida are rarely collected, leading to a paucity of literature despite their unique morphology. Populations range from Eurasia to Alaska (USA), but few specimens of ...

Calanus copepods C. finmarchicus, C. glacialis and C. hyperboreus are keystone species in the Arctic marine ecosystem, constituting 70-90% of the zooplankton biomass. In high latitudes, the growing season is short and unpredictable, and the winter long and unproductive. These species have adapted flexible life histories, lipid accumulation, and a state of deep-water diapause to survive. Winter ...

Invasive alien species are a major threat to global biodiversity due to the tremendous ecological and economic damage they cause in forestry, agriculture, wetlands, and pastoral resources. Understanding the spatial pattern of invasive alien species and disentangling the biophysical drivers of invasion at the forest stand level is essential for managing forest ecosystems and the wider landscape. ...

Cyanobacteria are an excellent source of bioactive natural products that can be used in the development of new medicinal drugs. The cyanobacterial genus Nostoc have proven to be prolific producers of molecules with exciting bioactivities, including anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-cancerous. This feature combined with the Nostoc’s complex life cycle and sizeable genomes make them interesting ...

While numerous regional studies of bathymetric zonation of benthic fauna globally have been done, few large-scale analyses exist, and no ocean-scale studies have focused on the Arctic Ocean to date. In the present work we, hence, examined bathymetric zonation of macro- and megabenthos over a depth range spanning from the shelf to the abyssal plain (14 – 5416 m) and regionally extending from the Fram ...

Back in 2021, we wrote an article defining the Astolfo Effect. That is what happens when a pop culture representation of a character (fictional or otherwise) becomes more popular than the original. We named it after Astolfo, one of Charlemagne’s paladins and arguably an obscure character in the works that make up the Matter of France and in later literature related to it (such as Orlando ...

Conservation of wildlife depends on precise and unbiased knowledge on the abundance and distribution of species. It is challenging to choose appropriate methods to obtain a sufficiently high detectability and spatial coverage matching the species characteristics and spatiotemporal use of the landscape. In remote regions, such as in the Arctic, monitoring efforts are often resource-intensive and there ...

In 2013, Brucella melitensis biovar 1 was recovered from the stomach contents of a scimitar-horned Oryx - SHO (Oryx dammah) aborted foetus, and from the articular fluid of a sand gazelle (Gazella marica) in a captive wildlife collection near Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Other evidence of exposure to the pathogen was collected through serological testing (Rose Bengal test) and B. melitensis-specific ...