Data from: Climate synchronises shrub growth across a high-arctic archipelago: contrasting implications of summer and winter warming ...

• Main Authors: Le Moullec, Mathilde, Sandal, Lisa, Grøtan, Vidar, Buchwal, Agata, Hansen, Brage
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2020
• Subjects: rain on snow; Salix polaris; spatial heterogeneity; Svalbard tundra; vegetation production; Arctic; Svalbard; Arctic Archipelago; Climate change; Polar willow; Tundra
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k3j9kd54c; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.k3j9kd54c

Climate change is most pronounced at high latitudes, where plant and animal populations are often strongly influenced by environmental fluctuations related to climate and weather. Environmental conditions can co-fluctuate over large distances and thereby synchronise primary production in space. However, large-scale studies of such spatiotemporal patterns remain rare in the Arctic, where short time-series and poor spatial replication have characterised the data available on both biotic and abiotic parameters. Here, we use dendrochronological tools to measure ring growth of a dominant dwarf shrub, the polar willow (Salix polaris Wahlenb.), previously found to reliably trace community-level vascular plant biomass production. We investigated climate drivers of vegetation growth and their role in the synchronisation of primary production across the rapidly warming archipelago of Svalbard (n = 8 sites, composed of 17 sub-sites, 0.06-293 km apart). We found contrasting effects of summer versus winter weather on ... : See the method section of the corresponding article doi:10.1111/oik.07059 ...