Sixty-year legacy of human impacts on a high Arctic ecosystem

The high Arctic is the world's fasting warming biome, allowing access to sections of previously inaccessible land for resource extraction. Starting in 2011, exploration of one of the Earth's largest undeveloped coal seams was initiated in a relatively pristine, polar desert environment in the Canadian high Arctic. Due to the relative lack of historic anthropogenic disturbance, significant gaps in knowledge exist on how the landscape will be impacted by development. At an abandoned airstrip located near the area of current exploration, we used a disturbance case–control approach to evaluate the long-term ecological consequences of high Arctic infrastructure disturbance to vegetation and sensitive, ice-rich permafrost. We quantified: (i) long-term effects on vegetation diversity, soil nutrients, and abiotic ground conditions and (ii) the alteration of the ground surface topography and legacy of subsurface thermal changes. We found that in over sixty years since abandonment, the disturbed ...北极高寒区（high Arctic）是全球变暖速度最快的生物群落区，为资源开发开辟了此前难以抵达的陆地区域。2011年起，科研人员在加拿大北极寒带核心区一处相对原始的极地荒漠环境中，启动了对地球最大未开发煤层之一的勘探工作。由于该区域历史上受人类活动干扰极少，目前对开发活动将如何影响当地景观的认知仍存在显著空白。在当前勘探区域附近一处废弃机场跑道处，我们采用干扰-对照实验法，评估了北极寒带基础设施扰动对植被以及敏感的富冰多年冻土（ice-rich permafrost）的长期生态后果。本研究量化了两项核心内容：(i) 对植被多样性、土壤养分及非生物地表条件的长期影响；(ii) 地表地形的改变与地下热变化的遗留效应。研究发现，在废弃六十余年后，受扰动区域的...