Last year’s extreme snowfall wiped out breeding of Arctic animals and plants

Climate change affects ecosystems not only through warming, but also by delivering more extreme weather events

In 2018, vast amounts of snow were spread across most of the Arctic region and did not melt fully until late summer, if at all. Publishing on October 15 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, researchers documented the consequences of this extreme weather event at Zackenberg, Northeast Greenland by extensively monitoring all components of the local ecosystem for more than 20 years, allowing them to compare life in the extreme year of 2018 to other, more “normal,” years.

The Arctic is home to a diverse and specialized group of organisms, highly adapted to life under the severe climatic conditions. But now the Arctic is changing, and the region is experiencing both long-term warming and retreating snow-cover. At the same time, climatic variability and the risk of extreme events is increasing. While the consequences of longer-term change are well-documented, we know almost nothing about the impacts of climatic variability and extreme events on the Arctic ecosystems.

The 2018 snow conditions resulted in the most complete reproductive failure ever encountered at Zackenberg, and only few plants and animals were able to reproduce due to abundant and late-melting snow. While poor reproduction had been observed in individual species before, such poor reproduction across all levels of the ecosystem had never been seen.

“One non-breeding year is hardly that bad for high-arctic species”, says Niels Martin Schmidt (Aarhus University, Denmark), lead author of the study. “The worrying perspective is that 2018 may offer a peep into the future, where increased climatic variability may push the arctic species to – and potentially beyond – their limits. Our study shows that climate change is more than ‘just’ warming, and that ecosystems may be hard hit by currently still rare but extreme events. What it also brings out is the unparalleled value of long-term observations of the Arctic. Only by keeping an eye on full arctic ecosystems can we understand the havoc brought by the changing climate”.

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Biology:  https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000392 

Press-only preview: https://plos.io/2Oj19DA

Citation: Schmidt NM, Reneerkens J, Christensen JH, Olesen M, Roslin T (2019) An ecosystem-wide reproductive failure with more snow in the Arctic. PLoS Biol 17(10): e3000392. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000392

Image Caption: The Zackenberg valley in Northeast Greenland, summer 2018 – huge amounts of snow still covered the ground in late June, where the snow-covered season usually is coming to an end.

Image Credit: Lars Holst Hansen

Funding: The Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the Danish Energy Agency are thanked for their financial support over the years. JR was supported by an International Polar Year grant and a Netherlands Polar Programme grant (NWO grants 851.30.008 and 866.15.207) and INTERACT grants for Transnational Access from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No 262693. JHC and MOL received funding from the European Research Council under the EU FP7 / ERC grant agreement 610055 as part of the ice2ice project. TR was funded by the Academy of Finland (grants 276909 and 285803). ‘The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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