Data from: Arctic greening from warming promotes declines in caribou populations ...
The migratory tundra caribou herds in North America follow decadal population cycles, and browsing from abundant caribou could be expected to counteract the current climate-driven expansion of shrubs in the circumpolar tundra biome. We demonstrate that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has provi...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.d12t1 https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.d12t1 |
| Summary: | The migratory tundra caribou herds in North America follow decadal population cycles, and browsing from abundant caribou could be expected to counteract the current climate-driven expansion of shrubs in the circumpolar tundra biome. We demonstrate that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has provided a strong signal for climate-induced changes on the adjacent caribou summer ranges, outperforming other climate indices in explaining the caribou-plant dynamics. We found no evidence of a negative effect of caribou abundance on vegetation biomass. On the contrary, we found a strong bottom-up effect in which a warmer climate related to diminishing sea ice has increased the plant biomass on the summer pastures, along with a paradoxical decline in caribou populations. This result suggests that this climate-induced greening has been accompanied by a deterioration of pasture quality. The shrub expansion in Arctic North America involves plant species with strong antibrowsing defenses. Our results might therefore be ... : Data Fauchald et al. SciAdv 2017Excel sheets including caribou population data, NDVI, sea-ice, temperature and snow cover.Data_Fauchald_et_al_SciAdv_2017.xlsx ... |
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