This article reports findings from two research projects that aimed to understand the vulnerabilities of cultural heritage sites in Svalbard and investigated factors that influence tourism-induced pressures and site degradation. It draws upon fieldwo...
Lakes in the High Arctic are characterized by their low water temperature, long-term ice cover, low levels of nutrients, and low biodiversity. These conditions mean that minor climatic changes may be of great importance to Arctic freshwater organisms...
Climate change is having a profound impact on Arctic microbiomes and their living environments. However, we have only incomplete knowledge about the seasonal and inter-annual variations observed among these microbes and about their methane regulation...
The Arctic is among the regions with the most rapid changes in climate and has the expected highest increase in temperature. Changes in the timing of phenological phases, such as onset of the growing season observed from remote sensing, are among the...
Arctic coasts, which feature land-ocean transport of freshwater, sediments, and other terrestrial material, are impacted by climate change, including increased temperatures, melting glaciers, changes in precipitation and runoff. These trends are assu...
Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard is a complex area with both continental and tidal glaciers. There are a lot of studies on prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities in coastal water and soil, but without studies in glacial-related waters. We make a distinct...
Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard archipelago, with 2400 permanent residents and approximately 150,000 tourists visiting every year. The city annually releases approximately 285,000 m3 of untreated wastewater to the nearby Adventfjor...
Global warming is increasing interest in the Arctic on surrounding countries. In the processes taking place, they see developmental opportunities and risks, especially for the environment overburdened by increased human activity. The need to balance...
Hiorthhamn is an abandoned Norwegian coal mining settlement with a loading dock and a lot of industrial infrastructure left in the coastal zone. In this study, changes in the position of 1.3 km of the Hiorthhamn shoreline, which affect cultural herit...
High Latitude Dust (HLD) deposition in the surface snow layer in two distant locations in Svalbard (Hornsund and Pyramiden) were collected during the June/July 2019 field campaign and examined in the laboratory. Despite the differences in their clima...
Strong cultural heritage management relies on a thorough evaluation of the threats faced by heritage sites, both in the present and in the future. In this study, we analysed the changes in the position of Hiorthhamn shoreline (Svalbard), which is aff...
Svalbard is a singular region to study biodiversity. Located at a high latitude and geographically isolated, the archipelago possesses widely varying environmental conditions and unique flora and fauna communities. It is also here where particularly...
Svalbard’s cultural heritage sites are important remnants of an international history in the High North. Cultural heritage in the Arctic is being impacted by climate and environmental change as well as increased human activity. Tourism is a pot...
We computed circum-Arctic surface velocity maps of glaciers and ice caps over the Canadian Arctic, Svalbard and the Russian Arctic for at least two times between the 1990s and 2017 using satellite SAR data. Our analyses are mainly performed with offs...
Biomass burning related aerosol episodes are becoming a serious threat to the radiative balance of the Arctic region. Since early July 2017 intense wildfires were recorded between August and September in Canada and Greenland, covering an area up to 4...
Arctic ecosystems are subjected to strong environmental constraints that prevent both the colonization and development of many organisms. In Svalbard, few aphid species have established permanent populations. These high arctic aphid species have deve...
Light-absorbing aerosols (LAA) impact the atmosphere by heating it. Their effect in the Arctic was investigated during two summer Arctic oceanographic campaigns (2018 and 2019) around the Svalbard Archipelago in order to unravel the differences betwe...
An integrated morphological and chemical analysis of Arctic aerosols was undertaken for Icelandic dust and Svalbard aerosols to be compared by scanning electron microscopy coupled with EDS microanalysis (SEM–EDS) via imaging and chemical analys...
The influence of climate change on microbial communities inhabiting the sparsely vegetated patterned ground soils that are widespread across the High Arctic is poorly understood. Here, in a four-year experiment on Svalbard, we warmed patterned ground...
We assessed fungal diversity in water and sediment samples obtained from five Arctic lakes in Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard Islands, High Arctic) and five Antarctic lakes on Livingston and Deception Islands (South Shetland Islands), using DNA metabarcod...
Glaciers play a crucial role in shaping global hydrology and biogeochemical cycles, yet their climate-forced dynamic impact on chemical denudation and solute yields remain poorly understood. This study compiled data on 40 well-documented cationic den...
The Arctic region is known to be severely affected by climate change, with evident alterations in both physical and biological processes. Monitoring the Arctic Ocean ecosystem is key to understanding the impact of natural and human-induced change on...
The seaweed Desmarestia aculeata (Phaeophyceae) is distributed in the temperate zone of the North Atlantic up to the Arctic, where it is exposed to a high Arctic light regime and fluctuating salinity conditions resulting from glacial and terrestrial...
Glacier movement is an important indicator of climate change, reflecting the quality and state changes in glacier migration and mass balance in the context of global warming. Although accurately estimating glacier surface flow velocity is crucial for...
Global warming results in increasingly widespread wildfires, mostly in Siberia, but also in North America and Europe, which are responsible for the uncontrollable emission of pollutants, also to the High Arctic region. This study examines 11 samples...
In the Arctic ecosystems, fungi are crucial for interactions between soil and plants, the cycling of nutrients, and the transport of carbon. To date, no studies have been conducted to thoroughly examine the mycobiome and its functional role in variou...
Sustainable management of nature-based tourism sites is a pertinent issue in vulnerable Arctic environments. Arctic tourism operators often act collectively to protect their common interests of ensuring the sustainability of tourism sites. Nowadays,...
The elemental composition in different Arctic fishes and invertebrates was investigated using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrophotometer (ICPMS). Nineteen elements such as Arsenic (As), Barium (Ba), Bismuth (Bi), Cadmium (Cd), Cesium (Cs), Chr...
The character of atmospheric pollution and its impact on surface waters may vary substantially in space, and hence, we add a potentially important location for the studies of atmospheric air pollution to the map of the High Arctic. We have investigat...
Ophiura sarsii is a common brittle star species across the Arctic and Sub-Arctic regions of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Ophiurasarsii is among the dominant echinoderms in the Barents Sea. We studied the genetic diversity of O.sarsii by seque...
Fjords in the high Arctic, as aquatic critical zones at the interface of land-ocean continuum, are undergoing rapid changes due to glacier retreat and climate warming. Yet, little is known about the biogeochemical processes in the Arctic fjords. We m...
In this study, we assess the accuracy and precision of digital elevation models (DEM) retrieved from aerial photographs taken in 2011 and from Very High Resolution satellite images (WorldView-2 and Pléiades) from the period 2012–2017. Ad...
The Arctic is a region undergoing continuous and significant changes in land relief due to different glaciological, geomorphological and hydrogeological processes. To study those phenomena, digital elevation models (DEMs) and highly accurate maps wit...
The repeat acquisition of high-resolution snow depth measurements has important research and civil applications in the Arctic. Currently the surveying methods for capturing the high spatial and temporal variability of the snowpack are expensive, in p...
Wood from the boreal forest represents an important resource for paper production and sawmill processing. Due to poor infrastructure and high transportation costs on land, timbers are often transported over long distances along large river systems. I...
This paper addresses the accuracy of estimates for the contemporary level of global thunderstorm activity found from the synchronous records of integrated Schumann resonance (SR) intensity at two high-latitude observatories in the Northern and Southe...
Information from extreme habitats of polymorphic populations is expected to answer questions related to evolutionary changes occurring at their niche border. Landlocked and resident/anadromous populations of the Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus (L.) s...
The Arctic is an important natural laboratory that is extremely sensitive to climatic changes and its monitoring is, therefore, of great importance. Due to the environmental extremes it is often hard to deploy sensors and observations are limited to...
Infrastructure expands rapidly in the Arctic due to industrial development. At the same time, climate change impacts are pronounced in the Arctic. Ground temperatures are, for example, increasing as well as coastal erosion. A consistent account of th...
Arctic biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are known to host diverse fungal communities that facilitate nutrient cycling and soil stabilisation in these harsh environments. In this study, the diversity and composition of fungi were assessed across ele...
In the age of remote sensing, particularly with new generation Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), there is a broad spectrum of applications, especially in remote and rapidly changing areas such as the Arctic. Due to challenging conditions in this regio...
Clouds play a significant role in regulating the Arctic climate and water cycle due to their impacts on radiative balance through various complex feedback processes. However, there are still large discrepancies in satellite and numerical model-derive...
The shorthorn sculpin (Myoxocephalus scorpius) is considered a suitable sentinel species for marine pollution in the Arctic due to its ecology and stationary habits. To evaluate its role as a bioindicator for potential natural and anthropic impacts o...
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used in glaciology demonstrating their potential for the generation of high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) that can be further used for the evaluation of glacial processes in detail....
The Arctic is under great pressure due to climate change. Drones are increasingly used as a tool in ecology and may be especially valuable in rapidly changing and remote landscapes, as can be found in the Arctic. For effective applications of drones,...
Svalbard is an arctic archipelago where coal mining generates all electricity via the local coal-fired power station. Coal combustion produces a waste product in the form of particulate matter (PM) coal fly ash (CFA), derived from incombustible miner...
To remotely monitor vegetation at temporal and spatial resolutions unobtainable with satellite-based systems, near remote sensing systems must be employed. To this extent we used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index NDVI sensors and normal digital...
Mineral dust composition affects a multitude of processes in the atmosphere and adjacent compartments. Dust dry deposition was collected near source in northwest Africa, in Central Asia, and on Svalbard and at three locations of the African outflow r...
The Arctic stratospheric ozone depletion event in spring 2020 was the most severe compared with previous years. We retrieved the critical indicator ozone vertical column density (VCD) using zenith scattered light differential optical absorption spect...
In this study, we compare the diurnal variation in stratospheric ozone of the MACC (Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate) reanalysis, ECMWF Reanalysis Interim (ERA-Interim), and the free-running WACCM (Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Mod...
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