NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Gwich'in Settlement Area

Tags: biology, revegetation, tree growth, tree core sampling, soil sampling

Objective(s): To monitor vegetation changes in current climate warming for simulating past and future dynamics with an individual-based spatially explicit model.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No.5263. The aim is to monitor vegetation changes in current climate warming for simulating past and future dynamics with an individual-based spatially explicit model. Therefore, the intentions are: 1) assessing stand inventories at diverse bioclimatic and environmental settings by a space-for-time approach; 2) gathering remote sensing data for local and regional upscaling across environmental gradients; and 3) year-round monitoring at key sites to disentangle the complex permafrost-soil-vegetation-climate interaction Vegetation cover and its underlying soils will be investigated and monitoring set up by the following methods: 1) sampling boreal forest taxa at equal distances (c. 50 km) along the bioclimatic gradient for inference of biogeography and genetic connectivity; 2) first census of tree stand inventory and ground vegetation surveys at diverse plots (natural undisturbed vs. disturbed by human impact, wildfire) including investigation of representative tree and shrub individuals of each present taxa along with sampling for dendrochronological and biomass analyses; 3) soil sampling for eDNA, pollen, charcoal, nutrients from each plot; 4) ground & airborne surveys for multispectral and LiDAR 3 dimensional point cloud generation of vegetation and microtopography over short transects covering gradients of land surface cover; and 5) setup monitoring sites by instrumenting soils with humidity and temperature and trees with tree-growth logger (dendrometer) for long-term monitoring (15 min interval, min 3 years). The research team will use social media channels for documentation during field work and the institute website for informing the public about the project and the outcome. A field report will be published in Reports on Polar and Marine Research (https://www.awi.de/en/about-us/publications/reports-on-polar-and-marine-research.html); The research results will be presented at international conferences. All data collected during the project period and the involved field work will be publicly available on the platform PANGAEA (https://www.pangaea.de/); Manuscripts based on the research will be priorily submitted to Open Access journals to allow public accession. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from July 20, 2022 to August 02, 2022