ARCTIC
SPRING COMES
WEEKS EARLIER THAN A DECADE AGO In
the Earth’s cold and icy far north, the harsh
winters are giving way to spring weeks earlier than they did just a
decade ago,
researchers have reported in the June 19th issue of Current
Biology,
published by Cell Press. In
the Earth’s cold and icy far north, the harsh winters are
giving way to spring
weeks earlier than they did just a decade ago, researchers have
reported in the
June 19th issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press. The
finding in the
Arctic, where the effects of global warming are expected to be most
severe,
offers an “early warning” of things to come on the
rest of the planet,
according to the researchers. “Despite
uncertainties in the magnitude of expected global warming over the next
century, one consistent feature of extant and projected changes is that
Arctic
environments are and will be exposed to the greatest
warming,” said Dr. Toke T.
Hoye of the National Environmental Research Institute, To
uncover the effects of warming, the researchers turned to phenology,
the study
of the timing of familiar signs of spring seen in plants, butterflies,
birds,
and other species. Shifts in phenology are considered one of the
clearest and
most rapid signals of biological response to rising temperatures, Hoye
explained. Yet
most long-term records of phenological events have come from much
milder
climes. For example, recent comprehensive studies have reported
advancements of
2.5 days per decade for European plants and 5.1 days per decade across
animals
and plants globally. Using
the most comprehensive data set available for the region, the
researchers now
document extremely rapid climate-induced advancement of flowering,
emergence,
and egg-laying in a wide array of High Arctic species. Indeed, they
show that
the flowering dates in six plant species, median emergence dates of
twelve
arthropod species, and clutch initiation dates in three species of
birds have
advanced, in some cases by over 30 days during the last decade. The
average
advancement across all time series was 14.5 days per decade. “We
were particularly surprised to see that the trends were so strong when
considering that the entire summer is very short in the High
Arctic—with just
three to four months from snowmelt to freeze up at our Zackenberg study
site in
northeast They
also found considerable variation in the response to climate change
even within
species, he added, with much stronger shifts in plants and animals
living in
areas where the snow melts later in the year. That variation could lead
to
particular problems by disrupting the complex web of species’
interactions, Hoye
said. ## Contact: This
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