NGEE Arctic Contributes to NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card

Issued annually since 2006, NOAA’s Arctic Report Card provides original, peer-reviewed updates on land, ice, ocean, and atmosphere observations made throughout the Arctic in a historic context. Taken together along with reports on new and emerging issues, the report chapters emphasize the many strong and complex connections within the Arctic system. This year, NGEE Arctic contributed to the update on’ Tundra Greenness’ led by G.V. Frost from the Alaska Biological Research, Inc. in Fairbanks, AK. Contributing to the essay were Verity Salmon, Amy Breen, Colleen Iversen, and Peter Thornton. Because of their experience working at the Kougarok field site and elsewhere across the NGEE Arctic project, these co-authors were able to provide insight on the climate and environmental drivers of vegetation change, and what kind of changes were observed and published by researchers in 2018-2019.  In addition to documenting observed patterns of tundra greening and browning, NGEE Arctic researchers contributed recently published findings on the expansion of alder shrubs in Arctic Alaska. Ecological disturbances such as tundra fire also contribute to large-scale changes in tundra greenness which NGEE Arctic will study in Phase 3 of the project. We look forward to contributing to the report’s temporal time-series of observations and seeing them used in similar analyses in the coming years.

Citation: Frost GV, US Bhatt, HE Epstein, DA Walker, MK Reynolds, L Berner, J Bjerke, AL Breen, B Forbes, S Goetz, CM Iversen, MJ Lara, MJ Macander, G Phoenix, A Rocha, VG Salmon, PE Thornton, H Tommervik, and SD Wullschleger (2019). NOAA Arctic Report Card – Tundra Greenness https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2019/ArtMID/7916/ArticleID/838/Tundra-Greenness.