Another Winter Tundra

Long-term recovery patterns of arctic tundra after winter seismic exploration.

In response to the increasing global demand for energy, oil exploration and development are expanding into frontier areas of the Arctic, where slow-growing tundra vegetation and the underlying permafrost soils are very sensitive to disturbance. The creation of vehicle trails on the tundra from seismic exploration for oil has accelerated in the past decade, and the cumulative impact represents a...

Carbon dioxide sources from Alaska driven by increasing early winter respiration from Arctic tundra.

High-latitude ecosystems have the capacity to release large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere in response to increasing temperatures, representing a potentially significant positive feedback within the climate system. Here, we combine aircraft and tower observations of atmospheric CO2 with remote sensing data and meteorological products to derive temporally and spatially resolve...

Opacity in Tundra Nenets

The analysis of opaque relations presents a problem to classic Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993), inherently a surface-oriented theory. Many different proposals have been made to integrate the analysis of opacity into OT. In this paper, we address the problem of opacity in Tundra Nenets (TN), a Uralic (Samoyedic) language spoken in Arctic Russia and No...

Opacity in Tundra Nenets

Vegetation responses in Alaskan arctic tundra after 8 years of a summer warming and winter snow manipulation experiment

We used snow fences and small (1m) open-topped fiberglass chambers (OTCs) to study the effects of changes in winter snow cover and summer air temperatures on arctic tundra. In 1994, two 60m long, 2.8m high snow fences, one in moist and the other in dry tundra, were erected at Toolik Lake, Alaska. OTCs paired with unwarmed plots, were placed along each experimental snow gradient and in control a...