Interpretation and evaluation of Snow and Ice from remote sensing using indigenous and Scientific expertise, ISIS
The Arctic and Sub-Arctic areas are recognized to be very sensitive to changes in climate.
Knowledge about the climate is relevant for adapting northern societies to future conditions.
Within the ISIS project we will combine traditional reindeer managing Sami knowledge about snow and ice conditions with scientific observations. Our methodology will be to analyze Sami observations of snow and ice together with ground based meteorological and geophysical observations. Two new weather stations with instrument that e.g. register snow depth will be put out during 2008. The ground observations will be coupled to remote sensing data of snow and ice (Envisat ASAR, TerraSAR X and ALOS PALSAR) to gain the regional coverage. Focus will be on which types of weather creates a certain snow and ice type, which in turn is important for when and where reindeers can reach and find food under the snow/ice cover. The aim is to gain further understanding of show and ice conditions for the future climate.
MULTIARC
Upland and Arctic ecosystems contain a considerable store of carbon: tundra systems alone contain 11% of the world’s soil carbon pool. There is much concern regarding the impacts of climate change on the capacity of these systems to store carbon. Understanding the processes that drive C (carbon) dynamics within these systems is therefore of major importance to the global carbon cycle and feedback to climatic warming. Additionally, we currently lack sufficient knowledge to understand how the drivers of Arctic ecosystem C dynamics scale up and how key components of the carbon cycle interact at different scales. Further, there is much need to understand these processes within systems of contrasting carbon stocks and ecosystem type, particularly given that much of the change in carbon dynamics within northern systems may be driven by the northward migration of more productive vegetation types. MultiArc's objective,
therefore, is to understand the plant, soil and freshwater driven processes that define carbon dynamics at the plot and ecosystem scale and to understand how these processes scale up to drive the catchment-scale carbon dynamics. To achieve this, this project will study carbon dynamics within contrasting points along a chronosequence from glacial forefield to birch woodland within a sub-Arctic catchment at Abisko, Sweden.
Subarctic birch forest carbon exchange in the Torneträsk catchment
This project is about ecosystem-atmosphere carbon exchanges in the subarctic and how it is affected by disturbance. The project has two goals: The first goal is to investigate the dynamics of recovery of the birch forest following outbreaks of Autumnal Moth (Epirrita autumnata) insects. The measurements will be made in policormic heath birch forests destroyed by insect outbreaks at three different points in time it the past, but all in the catchment of Tornetrask lake. This chronosequence will be compared with a “reference” site affected by insect outbreak in 2004 where measurements are being made continuously for the whole year.
The second goal is to use these campaign based measurements compared with the continuously running site to improve extrapolations of the birch forest ecosystem functioning in the whole of the catchment. This includes the annual carbon balance of the whole of the birch forest. This will be compared with large scale ecosystem model outputs developed and downscaled to the same catchment by a related project (PhD student Z. Yang).
Measurements will be made by a mobile eddy covariance tower. Helicopter will be needed to move measuring equipment to far and difficult accessible places.
