High-latitude greenhouse gases – a balancing act

This project aims to study the carbon cycling in the Arctic, which includes the exchange of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, as well as the export of carbon through other means than atmospheric exchanges. These include transport in rivers and the effects of grazing by large mammals. The project will try to understand the full budget of carbon, the so-called net ecosystem carbon balance (NECB), in the context of climate change. The impact of climate change on the NECB at two contrasting sites in the Arctic will be studied with a particular emphasis on the additional effects of local scale influences through disturbances such as grazing, insect outbreaks, and extreme events. The basic hypothesis to be studied is that local scale and episodic factors may overrule the impacts of an overarching warming trend.