Arctic aquatic graminoid tundra responses to nutrient availability

Abstract

Abstract. Unraveling the environmental controls influencing Arctic tundra productivity is paramount for advancing our predictive understanding of the causes and consequences of warming in tundra ecosystems and associated land-atmosphere feedbacks. This study focuses on aquatic emergent tundra plants, which dominate productivity and methane fluxes in the Arctic coastal plain of Alaska. In particular, we assessed how environmental nutrient availability influences production of biomass and greenness in the dominant aquatic tundra species: Carex aquatilis and Arctophila fulva. We sampled a total of 17 sites distributed across the Barrow Peninsula and Atqasuk, Alaska following a nutrient gradient that ranged from sites with thermokarst slumping or urban runoff to sites with relatively low nutrient inputs. Employing a multivariate analysis, we explained the relationship of soil and water nutrients to plant leaf macro- and micro-nutrients. Specifically, we identified soil phosphorus as the main limiting nutrient factor given that it was the principal driver of biomass and Normalize Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in both species. Plot-level spectral NDVI was a good predictor of leaf P content for both species. We found long-term increases in N, P and Ca in C. aquatilis based on historical leaf nutrient data from 1970s of our study area. This study highlights the importance of nutrient pools and mobilization between terrestrial-aquatic systems and their potential influence on productivity, carbon and energy balance. In addition, aquatic plant NDVI spectral responses to nutrients can serve as landscape hot-spot and hot-moment indicator of landscape biogeochemical heterogeneity associated with permafrost degradation, nutrient leaching and availability.

Remote Sensing of Tundra Ecosystems Using High Spectral Resolution Reflectance: Opportunities and Challenges

“…In the Arctic, plant functional traits vary remarkably within and across plant species and over space and time, controlled by the complex, fine-scale gradients (0.1-10 m) in climate, topography, water, and nutrients (Andresen & Lougheed, 2021;Bjorkman et al, 2018;Black et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2020;Thomas et al, 2020). In particular, traits that confer differing competitive advantages, such as those related to plant size and resource economics (e.g., leaf area, seed mass, height, LMA, N, and LDMC; Thomas et al, 2020), are highly sensitive to changes in micro-environments, making them difficult to characterize with traditional field surveys (Metcalfe et al, 2018;Schimel et al, 2015).…”