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