Arctic Wildlife Observatories Linking Vulnerable EcoSystems (ArcticWOLVES)

Climate change is strongly affecting Arctic ecosystems, as the distribution, abundance, and interactions of species are altered. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop programs for conserving biodiversity in response to likely losses of a significant proportion of Arctic species assemblages. These changes will also impact Inuit and other indigenous people that depend on wildlife species. In response to those needs, we developed the project ArcticWOLVES, which is a circumpolar study of tundra ecosystems aimed at understanding food webs and ecosystem processes affecting them, measuring current impact of climate change on wildlife, and predicting future impacts through modelling. Our program has two complementary goals. A first goal is to determine the relative importance of various processes in structuring Arctic food webs and to quantify the magnitude of these interactions. The second goal is to document direct and indirect impacts of climate change on terrestrial animal biodiversity (insects, birds, mammals) and forecast future impacts on animal populations and the Arctic ecosystem. A key feature of our project is to simultaneously document changes occurring in a large number of wildlife species at a number of sites over a large geographical range using standard protocols. This approach will provide the much-needed spatial replicates that are essential to make strong inferences, whereas variability among sites will give insights at different spatial scales and allow a comparative approach. Wildlife species of primary interest for ArcticWOLVES include herbivorous, insectivorous and predatory birds, small mammals and their predators and the insect and food plants of these species. Our project integrates scientific methodology and traditional knowledge of northern inhabitants to obtain data that will allow us to expand our temporal and spatial understanding of wildlife populations. ArcticWOLVES is a circumpolar initiative linked to sister projects in other countries. Arctic Predators is a Norwegian/Russian joint project funded by both countries, and is an integral part of ArcticWOLVES. In the Netherlands, the project BirdHealth has links with our project. In Canada, our project has established close ties with CiCAT, another project funded by the International Polar Year (IPY) program studying the tundra vegetation.