Research gaps and trends in the Arctic tundra: a topic-modelling approach

Climate change is affecting the biodiversity, ecosystem services and the well-being of people that live in the Arctic tundra. Understanding the societal implications and adapting to these changes depend on knowledge produced by multiple disciplines. We analysed peer-reviewed publications to identify...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:One Ecosystem
Main Authors: Francisco Ancin-Murguzur, Vera Hausner
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Pensoft Publishers 2020
Subjects:
so
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.5.e57117
https://doaj.org/article/cfd47d7e55e04c7c840d3dd25a1c26ad
Description
Summary:Climate change is affecting the biodiversity, ecosystem services and the well-being of people that live in the Arctic tundra. Understanding the societal implications and adapting to these changes depend on knowledge produced by multiple disciplines. We analysed peer-reviewed publications to identify the main research themes relating to the Arctic tundra and assessed to what extent current research build on multiple disciplines to confront the upcoming challenges of rapid environmental changes. We used a topic-modelling approach, based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm to detect topics based on semantic similarity. We found that plant and soil ecology dominate the tundra research and are highly connected to other ecological disciplines and biophysical sciences. Despite the fivefold increase in the number of publications during the past decades, the proportion of studies that address societal implications of climate change remains low. The strong scientific interest in the tundra reflects the concern of the rapid warming of the Arctic, but few studies include the cross-disciplinary approach necessary to fully assess the implications of these changes for society.