| Summary: | Temperature in the Arctic is increasing rapidly, potentially triggering global climate feedback if the carbon in the Arctic soil is released. Plants are affected by the rising temperature and play crucial roles in ecosystem function and atmosphere-soil interactions, including snow accumulation, soil shading, carbon fluxes and albedo. However, we lack clarity in how the community composition of plants responds to spatial and temporal temperature change. Additionally, it is unclear whether the coarse scale temperature grids commonly used in vegetation studies sufficiently represent the small-scale temperature variations in the Arctic landscape. Here, I explore how the relative abundance of plant functional groups and community temperature affinity are related to temperature to assess if spatial relationships on a microclimate scale can predict changes over time, a method known as space-for-time substitution. The plot based vegetation and temperature data utilized in this study is obtained from three arctic sites: Svalbard, Disko Island on Greenland and Latnjajaure in northern Sweden. The results show that the relative abundance of plant functional groups and community temperature affinity are strongly correlated with summer air temperature on a spatial microclimate scale across all three sites. In Latnjajaure, change over time in long-term monitoring plots were generally in the same direction as expected given observed spatial temperature-composition relationships, suggesting that recent climate change has caused a community composition shift of plants that is similar to spatial variation in sub-arctic regions. However, on higher latitudes no spatiotemporal relationship could be detected. Temperature does not act in isolation with the changing climate, soil moisture is one other driver closely connected to vegetation response, namely in shrubs. This study supports the view that plant communities, across the Arctic region as a whole, will have a heterogenous response to climate change.
|
|---|