Nual precipitation 261 mm Central valley floor dominated by Ericaceous evergreen (Cassiope tetragona), by heaths and arctic willow (Salix arctica)j, and by snow-beds, grasslands, and fens. This Higher Arctic ecosystem has Leukadherin-1 reasonably low biodiversity and low species redundancy BioBasis programme of NERI, Danish Environmental Protection Agency, CALM (Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring), ECOGLOBE (Aarhus University), INTERACT, Planet Wildlife Fund, GeoBasis, NARPProjectscollected information on a wide selection of variables due to the fact 1975 (Hobbie 2014). The long-term research site in the Zackenberg Valley (Table 1) is located around the coast of northeast Greenland exactly where environmental and ecological information happen to be collected since 1995 (National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University2). Both web pages are underlain by hundreds of meters of continuous permafrost and have comparable average annualhttp:information.g-e-m.dk.temperatures of -8 . Summers, nevertheless, are shorter and cooler at Zackenberg (four.five ) than at Toolik (9 ). The short and cool summers in the Zackenberg valley restrict the PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21301620 quantity of vascular plant species in the dominant moist heath tundra so this Higher Arctic site features a somewhat low biodiversity (Callaghan 2005; Schmidt et al. 2012). In contrast, the rolling uplands at the Low Arctic Toolik web page are dominated by dwarf-shrub heath-tussock tundra and have numerous more plant species. Bliss (1997) surveyed the North American Arctic, such as Greenland, and reported that the High Arctic has 300 species, mainly herbaceous forms, although the Low Arctic has 700 species, which includes several woody species for instance birch and willow.The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com www.kva.seenSAmbio 2017, 46(Suppl. 1):S160MATERIALS AND Techniques Environmental and ecological monitoring at Toolik and Zackenberg The monitoring plan at Toolik contains measurements on streams, lakes, and tundra (Table two). In this article, we incorporate final results of permafrost temperatures, vegetation growth, thaw depth, and lake alkalinity (Cherry et al. 2014; Shaver et al. 2014; Kling et al. 2014), extend the air temperature data, and add long-term satellite measures of plant biomass. The monitoring system of tundra and lakes at Zackenberg incorporates climate, the thickness with the active layer, plant community abundance, and productivity, and trends in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem components. Techniques for data from Toolik Cherry et al. (2014) described the surface air temperature (SAT) for the Toolik Field Station for the period 1989010 (Fig. 2). Right here we update the annual data via 2014 (Fig. two) and also separately analyze the air temperature in winter, spring, summer, and fall seasons (Fig. 3).Romanovsky et al. (2010) measured permafrost temperatures once a year because 1983 at a depth of 20 m in boreholes along the Dalton Highway. As a part of the international CALM plan (Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring described in Brown et al. 2000), summer thaw depth with the active layer in moist acidic tundra at Toolik was measured working with steel probes at 96 individual sites within a 200 9 900 m grid. At every site, three measurements had been averaged, along with a grand average of all sites was calculated for each of two dates in summers from 1990 to 2011. Further facts on thawing the soil came for measures of alkalinity in Toolik Lake. Alkalinity was determined by potentiometric titration (Kling et al. 1992, 2000) and was averaged across depth and.