Tourism and nature-based recreation has changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions caused sharp declines in visitation numbers, particularly in remote areas, such as northern Norway. In addition, the pandemic may have altered human-nature relationships by changing visitor behaviour and preferences. We studied visitor numbers and behaviour in northern Norway, based on ...

Demographic buffering and lability have been identified as adaptive strategies to optimise fitness in a fluctuating environment. These are not mutually exclusive, however, we lack efficient methods to measure their relative importance for a given life history. Here, we decompose the stochastic growth rate (fitness) into components arising from nonlinear responses and variance–covariance of demographic ...

The degradation mechanisms of faecal pellets are still poorly understood, although they determine their contribution to vertical fluxes of carbon. The aim of this study was to attempt to understand the microbial (bacteria and protozooplankton) degradation of faecal pellets by measuring the faecal pellet carbon-specific degradation rate (FP-CSD) as an indicator of pellet degradation. ‘In situ’ and ...

Benthic communities below the photic zone are largely reliant on the export of surface-water primary production and the flux of partially degraded organic matter to the seabed, i.e. pelagic−benthic coupling. Over the past decades, however, the role of chemosynthetically produced carbon in food webs has been recognized in various habitats. Cold seeps are now known to be widespread across circumpolar ...

Climate change and harvesting can affect the ecosystems' functioning by altering the population dynamics and interactions among species. Knowing how species interact is essential for better understanding potentially unintended consequences of harvest on multiple species in ecosystems. I analyzed how stage-specific interactions between two harvested competitors, the haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) ...

Light spectral quality is known to affect flavonoid biosynthesis during fruit ripening. However, the response of fruits to different light conditions, when ripening autonomously from the parent plant (detached), has been less explored. In this study, we analyzed the effect of light quality on detached and naturally ripening (attached) non-climacteric wild bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) fruits ...

Distinct swarms of Bosmina longispina (Leydig, 1860) (Crustacea: Cladocera) were visually observed and described in Gjøkvatn, a Norwegian forest lake at 69°N, in 1969 and again in 1996 and 2021. The repeated observations after many years show that Bosmina swarms occur regularly in the lake. The swarming is likely to be an anti-predation behaviour against the predatory cladoceran Polyphemus pediculus ...

The main aim of the article is to fill the gap concerning the recognition of constructs of programme management supporting open innovations. Current knowledge on this subject is mainly limited to identifying success factors of open innovation and programme management. In the current literature, there are few publications indicating the use of the programme as a tool supporting innovation. In ...

We examined spatial variation in total mercury (THg) concentrations in 100 hair samples collected between 2008 and 2016 from 87 polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from the Norwegian (Svalbard Archipelago, western Barents Sea) and Russian Arctic (Kara Sea, Laptev Sea, and Chukchi Sea). We used latitude and longitude of home range centroid for the Norwegian bears and capture position for the Russian bears ...

Different sea ice models apply unique approaches in the computation of nutrient diffusion between the ocean and the ice bottom, which are generally decoupled from the calculation of turbulent heat flux. A simple molecular diffusion formulation is often used. We argue that nutrient transfer from the ocean to sea ice should be as consistent as possible with heat transfer, since all of these fluxes ...