Joint Ecosystem Assessment of Warming Impacts

Increasing global temperatures affect ecosystems worldwide, but particularly those at high latitudes, where the rise in temperature is expected to be stronger while ecosystems are presumed to be more vulnerable. However, there is a lack of large-scale and long-running experiments measuring the impacts of warming on the various components of high latitude ecosystems. An exception is the large-scale natural warming experiment in Iceland ForHot (www.ForHot.is), which has steep gradients of temperature in an otherwise previously homogeneous ecosystem. Within ForHot, many aspects of ecosystem functioning and composition affected along the natural warming gradient are investigated by various European scientific groups. These activities will allow comprehensively analysing warming impacts through the various ecosystem components and their interactions. Within this workshop, data on the impacts of soil warming on different components will be jointly analysed and put in a wider context of high-latitude ecosystem functioning.

The aims of this workshop are to i) discuss and compare the results on ecosystem functioning impacts by warming as occurring at ForHot, ii) derive a conceptual framework on the joint mechanisms of warming in high-latitude ecosystems, iii) analyse data to determine a quantitative backbone of such framework and iv) to prepare a draft of a synthesis paper on this topic.

We aim to achieve this by having a limited number of presentations and ample time for discussions, data analysis and data comparisons.