Understanding how individual animals modulate their behaviour and movement patterns in response to environmental variability plays a central role in behavioural ecology. Marine mammal tracking studies typically use physical environmental characteristics that vary, and/or proxies of prey distribution, to explain predator movements. Studies linking predator movements and the actual distributions ...

Trål har i liten grad vore brukt ved undersøkingar av fiskesamfunn i norske innsjøar. Gjennom innføringa av Vanndirektivet har Norge forplikta seg til meir regulær oppfølging av den økologiske tilstanden i større vassførekomstar. Tettleik, rekruttering, artsfordeling og vekst hjå fisk er alle parametrar der ein kan forvente relativt rask respons på miljøendringar. Det er derfor viktig å ha ...

Climate change forces many species to migrate. Empirical small-scale data on migration and colonization in the Arctic are scarce. Retreating glaciers provide new territory for cold-adapted plant species, but the genetic consequences depend on dispersal distances and frequencies. We estimated local, regional, and long-distance dispersal frequencies, as well as their effect on levels of genetic ...

Climate change and the intensification of land use practices are causing widespread eutrophication of subarctic lakes. The implications of this rapid change for lake ecosystem function remain poorly understood. To assess how freshwater communities respond to such profound changes in their habitat and resource availability, we conducted a space‐for‐time analysis of food‐web structure in 30 lakes ...

Zooplankton vertical migration enhances the efficiency of the ocean biological pump by translocating carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) below the mixed layer through respiration and excretion at depth. We measured C and N active transport due to diel vertical migration (DVM) in a Svalbard fjord at 79°N. Multifrequency analysis of backscatter data from an Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler moored from January ...

A recent study demonstrated that an Arctic tidal strait, where a shoaled and constricted waterway increases tidally driven sub-ice currents and turbulence, represents a “hotspot” for ice algal production due to a hypothesized enhanced ocean-ice nutrient supply. Based on these findings, we sampled the bottom-ice algal community across the same tidal strait between the Finlayson Islands within Dease ...

Assessment of Arctic deep-sea ecosystem functioning is currently an urgent task considering that ongoing sea-ice reduction opens opportunities for resource exploitation of yet understudied deep-sea regions. We used Biological Trait Analysis to evaluate ecosystem functioning and test if common paradigms for deep-sea fauna apply to benthic epifauna of the deep-sea Arctic Chukchi Borderland (CBL). We ...

Humans depend on services provided by ecosystems, and how services are affected by climate change is increasingly studied. Few studies, however, address changes likely to affect services from seminatural ecosystems. We analyzed ecosystem goods and services in natural and seminatural systems, specifically how they are expected to change as a result of projected climate change during the 21st ...

Over the last two decades, the use of DNA barcodes has transformed our ability to identify and assess life on our planet. Both strengths and weaknesses of the method have been exemplified through thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles. Given the novel sequencing approaches, currently capable of generating millions of reads at low cost, we reflect on the questions: What will the future bring ...