Greening of the Arctic: An IPY Initiative

International Polar Year (IPY)

What is the International Polar Year?

The Polar Regions are remote areas of the Earth that have profound significance for the Earth's climate and ultimately environments, ecosystems and human society.

However, we still remain remarkably ignorant of many aspects of how polar climate operates and its interaction with polar environments, ecosystems and societies. To have any hope of understanding the current global climate and what might happen in future, the science community needs a better picture of conditions at the poles and how they interact with and influence the oceans, atmosphere and land masses. Existing climate models do not work well in the polar regions and have for example failed to predict the dramatic break-up of Antarctic ice shelves observed in recent years. The three fastest warming regions on the planet in the last two decades have been Alaska, Siberia and parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, Thus the Polar Regions are highly sensitive to climate change and this raises real concern for the future of polar ecosystems and Arctic society.

There have been a number of major international science initiatives in Polar Regions since the first International Polar Year in 1882-83 and all have had a major influence in overhauling our understanding of global processes in these important areas. These initiatives have involved an intense period of interdisciplinary research, collecting a broad range of measurements that provide a snapshot in time of the state of the polar regions. The last such initiative was the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58, involving 80,000 scientists from 67 countries.

It produced unprecedented exploration and discoveries in many fields of research and fundamentally changed how science was conducted in the polar regions. Fifty years on, technological developments such as earth observation satellites, autonomous vehicles and molecular biology techniques offer enormous opportunities for a further quantum step upwards in our understanding of polar systems. An IPY in 2007-2008 also affords an opportunity to engage the upcoming generation of young Earth System scientists and to get the public to realize just how much the cold ends of the sphere we all live on really do influence us. To ensure that researchers get the opportunity to work in both polar regions or work summer and winter if they wish, the Polar Year will actually run from March 2007-March 2009.

International Polar Year 2007 - 2009

GoA Component Projects:

Documenting the rapid and dramatic changes to terrestrial vegetation that are expected to occur across the circumpolar Arctic as a result of climate change is a key goal of the IPY. Changes in the biomass of terrestrial ecosystems will likely affect the permafrost, active layer, carbon reserves, trace-gas fluxes, hydrological systems, biodiversity, wildlife populations and the habitability of the Arctic. Changes in green biomass can be expected across the entire bioclimate gradient from treeline to the coldest parts of the Arctic. The Greening of the Arctic (GOA) initiative consists of a group of scientists who are associated with the one or more of the four major components.

Synthesis of Arctic System Science (SASS)

The first component examines the 24-year record of greenness across the entire circumpolar Arctic as measured by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) using satellite imagery (AVHRR and MODIS). The study chronicles historical trends in NDVI, documenting areas of major increases or decreases in the NDVI, and links these trends to changes in sea-ice distribution, land-surface-temperatures, snow-cover, bioclimate subzones, vegetation type, glacial history, and other variables in a circumpolar GIS database that is part of the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM). Modeling studies use past trends in NDVI to predict future distribution of arctic vegetation using the BIOME4 model. Transient dynamics of the vegetation are studied using the ArcVeg model. The project focuses along a North American Arctic Transect (NAAT) where extensive ground data are available. This component is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

SASS Proposal

Application of space-based technologies and models to address

land-cover/land-use change problems on the Yamal Peninsula, Russia (LCLUC)

The second component is funded by NASA’s Land-Cover Land-Use Change (LCLUC) program, and contributes to NASA’s global-change observations regarding the consequences of the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the greening of terrestrial vegetation that is occurring in northern latitudes. The work is also part of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI). It addresses the NEESPI science questions regarding the local and hemispheric effects of anthropogenic changes to land use and climate in northern Eurasia.

The overarching goal of our research is to use remote-sensing technologies to examine how the terrain and anthropogenic factors of reindeer herding and resource development, combined with the climate variations on the Yamal Peninsula, affect the spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation change and how those changes are in turn affecting traditional herding by indigenous people of the region.

The Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia has undergone extensive anthropogenic disturbance and transformation of vegetation cover over the past 20 years due to gas and oil development and overgrazing by the Nenets reindeer herds. It has been identified as a “hot spot” for both Arctic climate change and land-use change.

NASA Yamal Project

The Circumpolar Arctic Geobotanical Atlas (AGA)

The outreach/education component of the project is a web-based Arctic Geobotanical Atlas (AGA) that uses a variety of tools to help students, educators, scientists, land managers, and the public to understand issues related to the greening of the Arctic. Users can download and use GIS data from the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map and maps at several sites along the GOA transects, in combination with other remote-sensing products. This component is already funded by an NSF grant. Educational application of the AGA in the classroom will be proposed at a later date. Linkage of the project to the University of the Arctic and Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) will also occur in relationship to the human dimensions aspects of the project.

Arctic Geobotanical Atlas

North American Arctic Transect (NAAT)

The fourth component addresses the collection of ground biomass data and site characterization along the NAAT and EAT transects. This will provide a legacy of the data and infrastructure along the full arctic climate gradient at representative sites in each bioclimate subzone in western Canada and on the Yamal Peninsula-Svalbard transect. Standard protocols and field manuals for biomass collection, and other site characterization are being developed in concert with researchers at other established sites, such as existing CALM and ITEX sites and flagship observatories, to expand the network of biomass collection sites. This work is being proposed to NSF, and builds on a previously funded Biocomplexity of Patterned Ground project.

North American Arctic Transect