Does climate change and plant phenology research neglect the Arctic tundra?

• Main Authors: Diepstraten, Rianne AE, Jessen, Tyler D, Fauvelle, Catherine MD, Musiani, Marco
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Arctic tundra; climate change; current research effort; Europe; North America; plant phenology; research investiment; Climate change; Tundra
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/903453

Phenology, the annual timing of naturally recurring events in animals and plants, is exhibitingsignificant changes in response to climate change. Drastic shifts in the timing of plant activity have beenobserved in high-latitude environments in particular, which are exposed to the greatest amount of warm-ing. Taking into consideration the importance of plant growth and seasonal availability for the wholeecosystem, we would hope that ample research is conducted on the impacts of climate change on plantphenology in the Arctic tundra. We provide a geographic and temporal overview of research relating toimpacts of climate change on plant phenology and investigate whether the Arctic tundra is receiving theresearch attention that appears warranted due to the rapid warming and large expected changes in thisbiome. We conducted a literature search for articles using the Institute for Scientific Information Web ofScience and evaluated focus on biomes, and temporal trends for 2000–2015. We found that the tundra wasone of the least researched biomes, when compared to all other biomes. Proportional to the land surfacethe tundra covers, significantly less research in North America has been devoted to this biome thanexpected, while profusion of research in Europe was as expected. Additionally, we found that in the pastsixteen years, despite the increase in the number of articles published relating to climate change and plantphenology, the proportion of the research devoted to the tundra decreased over time. Ourfindings alsoindicate that more work is being done on plant phenology and climate change in lower latitudes. We sug-gest that the results of this analysis are due to three non-insurmountable obstacles (access, expense, andcomplexity) and provide practical suggestions for increased investment in climate change and plant phe-nology research in the otherwise neglected Arctic tundra.