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 fairly low biodiversity and low species redundancy BioBasis programme of NERI, Danish Environmental Protection Agency, CALM (Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring), ECOGLOBE (Aarhus University), INTERACT, World Wildlife Fund, GeoBasis, NARPProjectscollected information on a wide selection of variables given that 1975 (Hobbie 2014). The long-term investigation web page in the Zackenberg Valley (Table 1) is positioned around the coast of northeast Greenland exactly where environmental and ecological information happen to be collected due to the fact 1995 (National Environmental Research Institute, Aarhus University2). Both web sites are underlain by hundreds of meters of continuous permafrost and have comparable average annualhttp:information.g-e-m.dk.temperatures of -8 . Summers, on the other hand, 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 number of vascular plant species inside the dominant moist heath tundra so this Higher Arctic internet site includes a comparatively low biodiversity (Callaghan 2005; Schmidt et al. 2012). In contrast, the rolling uplands in the Low Arctic Toolik web page are dominated by dwarf-shrub heath-tussock tundra and have quite a few a lot more plant species. Bliss (1997) surveyed the North American Arctic, like Greenland, and reported that the High Arctic has 300 species, mostly herbaceous types, 
though the Low Arctic has 700 species, including a variety of woody species such as birch and willow.The Author(s) 2017. This short article is published with open access at Springerlink.com www.kva.seenSAmbio 2017, 46(Suppl. 1):S160MATERIALS AND Methods Environmental and ecological monitoring at Toolik and Zackenberg The monitoring plan at Toolik incorporates measurements on streams, lakes, and tundra (Table two). Within this ZL006 price report, we involve 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 information, and add long-term satellite measures of plant biomass. The monitoring system of tundra and lakes at Zackenberg includes climate, the thickness of the active layer, plant community abundance, and productivity, and trends in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem elements. Solutions for information from Toolik Cherry et al. (2014) described the surface air temperature (SAT) for the Toolik Field Station for the period 1989010 (Fig. 2). Here we update the annual information by means of 2014 (Fig. 2) and also separately analyze the air temperature in winter, spring, summer season, and fall seasons (Fig. three).Romanovsky et al. (2010) measured permafrost temperatures as soon as a year given that 1983 at a depth of 20 m in boreholes along the Dalton Highway. As a part of the international CALM system (Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring described in Brown et al. 2000), summer season thaw depth with the active layer in moist acidic tundra at Toolik was measured working with steel probes at 96 person internet sites inside a 200 9 900 m grid. At every single site, 3 measurements had been averaged, in addition to a grand typical of all web-sites was calculated for each and every of two dates in summers from 1990 to 2011. Additional data 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.
