Recent Warming and Cooling in the Antarctic Peninsula Region has Rapid and Large Effects on Lichen Vegetation

• Published in: Scientific Reports
• Main Authors: Sancho, Leopoldo G., Pintado, Ana, Navarro, Francisco, Ramos, Miguel, Pablo, Miguel Ángel de, Blanquer, Jose Manuel, Raggio, Jose, Valladares Ros, Fernando, Allan Green, T. G.
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Springer Nature 2017
• Subjects: Plant stress responses; Biodiversity; Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/193888; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-05989-4; https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003329

© The Author(s) 2017. The Antarctic Peninsula has had a globally large increase in mean annual temperature from the 1951 to 1998 followed by a decline that still continues. The challenge is now to unveil whether these recent, complex and somewhat unexpected climatic changes are biologically relevant. We were able to do this by determining the growth of six lichen species on recently deglaciated surfaces over the last 24 years. Between 1991 and 2002, when mean summer temperature (MST) rose by 0.42 °C, five of the six species responded with increased growth. MST declined by 0.58 °C between 2002 and 2015 with most species showing a fall in growth rate and two of which showed a collapse with the loss of large individuals due to a combination of increased snow fall and longer snow cover duration. Increased precipitation can, counter-intuitively, have major negative effects when it falls as snow at cooler temperatures. The recent Antarctic cooling is having easily detectable and deleterious impacts on slow growing and highly stress-tolerant crustose lichens, which are comparable in extent and dynamics, and reverses the gains observed over the previous decades of exceptional warming. This research was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (CTM2015-64728-C2-1-R, CTM2014-56473-R and CTM2014-50521-R). Peer Reviewed