As climate change warms the Arctic, satellite images reveal widespread greening of these northern ecosystems.
This trend is one of the major large-scale responses of vegetation to climate change, clearly visible from space. Because of feedback mechanisms between ecosystems and the climate system, Arctic greening could alter the global surface energy budget and soil carbon storage.
At first glance, one might think this 'greening of the Arctic' is as simple as vegetation growing better in a warmer climate. The paper reveals that the the underlying processes and trends are more complex, and largely dependent on scale.
Both remotely sensed and ecological data on the ground is needed to understand the trends, but can be difficult to combine in practice. To start with, the two research fields use different definitions of what greening means.
The authors sum up the challenges of observing and interpreting the greening trends, and set out to reconcile the remote sensing and ecological perspectives.
Congratulations to the authors on getting their paper published. In addition to Anders, our colleagues Frode Stordal, Jarle W. Bjerke, Hans Tømmervik and Frans-Jan Parmentier in LATICE and EMERALD were also involved in this paper. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0688-1