| Summary: | Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2023 The Arctic is warming rapidly due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Concurrent with warming, some Arctic plant communities have transformed from short statured evergreen and graminoid shrub tundra to tall deciduous shrubs in recent decades. As warming continues, plant-plant interactions will likely change and influence future community composition. Alnus viridis ssp. fruticosa (Siberian alder) is rapidly expanding across Arctic regions and is particularly important because Siberian alder is the Arctic's only large N-fixing shrub, may alter N-cycling to further influence both C-cycling and community composition as it spreads. This dissertation addressed two main questions to better understand how Arctic deciduous shrub communities have changed, and may continue to change as Arctic warming proceeds. First, how did the climate sensitivity of Siberian alder's growth change over the past century (1920 - 2017), and how did climate sensitivity change as Siberian alder grew older? Second, how has Siberian alder affected the long-term growth of two nearby dominant deciduous shrub species: Betula nana ssp. exilis (dwarf birch) and Salix pulchra (diamondleaf willow)? I used dendrochronological techniques to assess how sensitive the growth of each of these three species was to climate over the last century. For dwarf birch and diamondleaf willow, I compared growth near and away from Siberian alder. I hypothesized that Siberian alder shrubs would become more sensitive to climate as they grew both older and larger. I expected that older alder would enhance soil N availability over time, due to the accumulated products of N-fixation. I also expected that the growth of larger, older alders would be more sensitive to climate than the growth of younger alder, because of having both a greater photosynthetic capacity (enabling more growth under good conditions), but also higher maintenance respiration (leading to less growth under poor conditions). I found that ...
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