22. August 2024

The COAT field season is well underway, and several fieldworks have already been completed. Here is a brief report from some of them that took place in Finnmark.

25. April 2024 A new study from COAT uncovers suitability of habitats for the three key herbivorous species in the Norwegian high Arctic Island group Svalbard: the Svalbard reindeer, the Svalbard rock ptarmigan, and pink-footed goose. Only a small fraction of the vegetated tundra was suitable for these species combined. Management and conservation of Svalbard tundra needs therefore to consider...

15. March 2024 COAT contributes with two articles to FRAM FORUM 2024, which was launched on 14 March. The magazine contains knowledge and research produced by the institutions at the Fram Centre, FRAM - High North Research Centre for Climate and the Environment. The two COAT articles is first a prortrait interview with COAT leader and professor in ecology Rolf Anker Ims: An ecosystem guy in the era of...

11. March 2024 COAT's leader, Professor Rolf A. Ims, talks about the lemming, its important role in the tundra ecosystem, and how it is affected by climate changes. See Opplyst about lemmings texted in English. All UiT Enlightened

7. November 2023

COAT is part of Nutrient Network, a worldwide network of research stations linked to grasslands. We have our "stations" on the Varanger peninsula and have contributed to a publication in Nature Communications.

7. November 2023 The red fox trapping season in Varanger for COAT’s arctic fox module has started again! So far we caught 2 red foxes this year, a young male and an adult female. Both were equipped with GPS collars and released to study their movement on the tundra. Join us with tracking them live here, or read the recent article about our work in Ságat (in Norwegian). See release-videos in Facebook or...

18. October 2023 Camera traps have become a popular tool in nature science. An example of this is the novel camera trap method we have developed in COAT for monitoring of small mammals. This method provides important information about the animas without affecting them at all. However, novel methods also provide novel challenges. Up until now, researchers would have to look through hundreds of thousands of...

4. October 2023

Geometrid moths are insects with a holometabolic life cycle. This means that the larvae, which feed on the leaves of birch trees in summer, undergo a complete metamorphosis into adult moth during the autumn. The adult moths have just begun their flight period, and COAT researchers are on their track!

11. September 2023

This report from this year's COAT fieldwork in Svalbard deals with our monitoring of eastern voles and arctic foxes in Svalbard, mainly in the area around Isfjorden.

25. January 2023

Small rodents are crucial to the functioning of the tundra food-web because of their spectacular population cycles which gives the predators waste amounts of food in the peak years and cause a huge grazing pressure on the food-plants. Despite their importance much are still unknown about small rodents and their food-web interactions.

20. January 2023 Why is it interesting for a researcher to dig in the snow in January? It's just snow there, isn't it? Yes, it is snow, but we want to know what type of snow, and whether there are hard crusts and ice on the ground. The snow conditions now in winter can determine whether we get a small rodent peak year next summer. And if it will be a small rodent year with a lot of Lemming, we know for...

28. November 2022

After two years of collaboration with French bio-acousticians, the Ptarmigan module is now thoroughly testing the resulting algorithms for automatic detection/classification of Willow and Rock ptarmigan from our bio-acoustic monitoring on Varanger Peninsula.

11. October 2022

The 6^th International arctic fox conference was arranged by the Norwegian Polar Institute in Longyearbyen 26-29 August. The conference was held at the University Centre in Svalbard and had in total 69 participants, of which 24 were online, from 14 countries.

13. September 2022

Long-term monitoring represents a baseline approach for climate-ecological studies. Analyses and modeling of such monitoring data provide opportunities to generate explanatory predictions, used to test ecological theories, but also anticipatory predictions, suited to inform future management and policy decisions.

7. September 2022 This year's counting trip has been completed and many reindeer were counted on the isolated peninsulas on the west coast of Svalbard. These localities form one of the core areas for monitoring Svalbard reindeer. Both the population on Brøggerhalvøya and on the islands in Forlandssundet – Sarsøyra and Kaffiøyra – were large this year with consistently good calf production at all monitoring...

30. August 2022 COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT and several stakeholders, including the landowner Finnmarkseiendommen (FeFo).Now we have the results of this year’s FeFo assessment (i.e. line-transect surveys) to compare with our predictions which was...

26. August 2022

Despite moderate abundances of rodents (an increase phase year) 12 arctic fox litters and 76 pups have been registered on Varanger Peninsula so far this summer.

12. July 2022

COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT and several stakeholders, including the landowner Finnmarkseiendommen (FeFo).

13. June 2022

On 8th of June Eivind Kleiven has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Population cycles in small rodents seen through the lens of a wildlife camera".

8. June 2022

On the 3rd of June Pedro Da Silva Nicolau has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Boreal rodents fluctuating in space and time. Tying the observation process to the modeling of seasonal population dynamics".

2. June 2022

On 24th of May Isabell Eischeid has successfully defended her PhD thesis “Tundra vegetation ecology from the sky - Aerial images and photogrammetry as tools to monitor landscape change”.

13. May 2022

Members of COAT Varanger’s ptarmigan module has recently deployed the sound stations for this year’s monitoring in the study area just above Bergebydalen in Nesseby municipality. This work started back in 2017, and this is therefore the 6^th years of monitoring the two arctic ptarmigan species by use of bioacoustics.

29. April 2022

COAT have in collaboration with Rovfuglgruppa I Vest-Finnmark, for the fourth consecutive year, checked how many gyrfalcons, golden eagles and ravens that are attempting to breed on the Varanger peninsula.

19. April 2022 We have started a large carcass-project in Svalbard and the first pictures is already collected. It will be interesting to see how the predators behave. The project is a collaboration between Norwegian Polar Institute, COAT and Nord Universitet. To read more about this study see Norwegian Polarinstitue's article presenting the study (in Norwegian). The same study has been carried out by COAT...

18. February 2022

You may have heard about our gps-tracking project of red foxes on Varanger Peninsula. You can now participate by exploring the latest positions on this interactive and automatically updated map.

9. February 2022 SUSTAIN was a nationally coordinated research project funded by the Research Council of Norway during 2015-2021. The project included three geographic nods (research groups): Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) in Oslo, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics (CBD) in Trondheim and COAT in Tromsø. A SUSTAIN special issue of the journal Climate Research has now been published. 

8. December 2021

COAT researchers monitor vegetation disturbances by biotic and abiotic factors, such as herbivory and extreme winter weather. However, these are not typical vegetation classes included in remote-sensing based maps.

14. October 2021 COAT expands the vegetation monitoring at Svalbard, now including drones and high-resolution imagery. The team is learning to use advanced equipment to capture not only changes in the vegetation but also to quantify disturbances from herbivores and damage after winters with a lot of ice covering the ground.

29. September 2021 COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT, the research project SUSTAIN and several stakeholders, including the landowner Finnmarkseiendommen (FeFo). The stakeholders wanted the models to be used to predict the ptarmigan populations one and...

21. September 2021

An international team led by a COAT -professor at UiT proposes a mechanism by which the large Pleistocene mammals were essential in promoting a very high floristic diversity, and that a similar mechanism is likely to promote diversity in our contemporary grasslands. The idea arised in the tundra grasslands of Varanger Peninsula during monitoring for COAT.

17. September 2021 The Eastern European vole is the only alien mammal species in Svalbard and the host for a zoonotic parasite. In a new paper published in PNAS, COAT researchers analyze the vole’s population dynamics. These analyses provide insight about the expected development of the vole population in a warming climate in Svalbard and more generally, what drives the renowned vole and lemming cycles in the...

31. August 2021

Large-scale moth outbreaks have led to profound changes in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indirect effects on the belowground compartment are poorly known.

16. June 2021

Long time series are important for understanding changes in nature. Despite extensive research on vegetation in Svalbard, long-term monitoring has been lacking. But we can now present “Year 1” of Svalbard vegetation monitoring within COAT.

29. March 2021 Snow measurements are an important part of the monitoring done in COAT – snow is indeed an important driver of many processes underlying dynamics of arctic ecosystems. The measurements we do focus on simple measurements of snow depths in different habitats (snowbeds, hummock, meadow, heath), as well as much more detailed assessment of the different layers in the snow cover, particularly the...

18. February 2021 Iterative near-term forecasting is a promising approach to better understand and manage rapidly changing ecosystems such as the Arctic. Forecasts generated on a short-term time scale allow scientific hypotheses to be tested more frequently, speeding up scientific advancement, and are relevant to managers because the time scale can be influenced by decision-making. This approach was used by...

11. February 2021 In the first week of February, a small team from COAT and local experts Alfred Ørjebu and John Arne Kristiansen placed 3 wooden box traps designed for live trapping red foxes in southeastern Varanger peninsula. The effort is part of a new research project that attempts to deploy GPS collars on red foxes to investigate their movement behavior as part of the COAT Arctic Fox module

26. October 2020 Measures of plant chemical traits are often achieved by merging several leaves, masking potential foliar variation within and among plant individuals. In a new study, COAT researchers developed a new application of Near-infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) methodology that provides measures of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and silicon from single, whole leaves down to the size of just 4 mm.

13. October 2020

Vegetation monitoring was carried out in late July and early August in Komagdalen and Vestre Jakobselv on the Varanger peninsula. Besides the annual monitoring in heath and meadow sites, the fieldteam also conducted point intercept frequency in newly established heath sites further away from the productive river valleys.

28. September 2020 The average temperature for June, July and August at Svalbard Airport was 7.2 degrees, which is 3 degrees above normal, and 0.5 degrees above the old summer record from 2015. For Svalbard Airport, a series of measurements dating back to 1899 has been prepared. This year's summer is extreme. It joins the ranks of hot summers for the last 20 to 30 years, and stands out completely from the...

24. September 2020

There were five dens with confirmed reproduction this summer, despite the low small rodent abundance. Three were in the eastern half of the Peninsual and two further to the west. It is likely that there were some places with some remaining lemmings, as quite a few lemming remains were found on at least one den.

24. September 2020

Thanks to local forces already in Svalbard and Ingrid traveling up, the annual vegetation monitoring in Svalbard was successfully carried out despite restrictions to travel due to covid-19.

28. August 2020 The new Reconyx cameras adapted to COAT’s small mammal photoboxes arrived (at last!) in August and have just enabled us to finalize the monitoring system for the invasive Eastern European vole (formerly named the Sibling vole) in Svalbard.Read more: Community-based actions against an invasive rodent and its zoonotic parasite in Longyearbyen.

25. August 2020 The COAT article “Can novel pest outbreaks drive ecosystem transitions in northern-boreal birch forest?” in Journal of Ecology was shortlisted for the Harper Prize early researcher award earlier this spring.

24. March 2020 Recently the Moss Tundra Module by Ravolainen et.al has published the paper High Arctic ecosystem states: Conceptual models of vegetation change to guide long-term monitoring and research in Ambo’s special edition Terrestrial biodiversity in a rapidly changing Arctic.

24. March 2020

The Research Council of Norway has funded a new three-year project that will be led by core personnel from the tundra-forest module of COAT.

18. March 2020

Fram Forum is an annual popular scientific publication of the Fram Centre. COAT researchers contribute with several articles in the 2020 issue.

6. February 2020

On January 27^th Statens Naturoppsyn (SNO) together with Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) and COAT released 14 arctic fox pups on Varanger Peninsula.

13. December 2019

COAT researchers Ole Petter Laksforsmo Vindstad and Jane Uhd Jepsen have won the first Fægri price for an article on geometrid moths in the Norwegian popular science journal Naturen.

8. October 2019

COAT Svalbard has now implemented and operationalized several types of research infrastructure in the core areas in Nordenskiöld Land and in Brøgger Peninsula.

27. September 2019

COAT Varanger has established small rodent exclosures that distinguish between direct and indirect climate impacts on vegetation.