Large herbivores play a crucial role in maintaining vegetation structure and composition of Arctic ecosystems in times of global change by grazing and trampling on plants and moving nutrients across the landscape. However, the role of herbivores in shaping the size of ecological communities and overall biodiversity in the Arctic is poorly understood.
Measuring ecological communities and biodiversity is a challenge difficult to overcome because it requires the extensive participation of researchers with deep taxonomic knowledge to conduct field inventories. An alternative approach entails employing existing indexes that indicate the number of organisms that interact with a particular plant species. In this study, we coupled vegetation data from a network of plots scattered across the Fennoscandian tundra with an index developed for Swedish flora to understand how herbivores shape ecological communities and overall biodiversity.
We found that herbivores reduce the size of ecological communities by grazing on taller plants which commonly interact with a higher number of species. Our study highlights the importance of preserving reindeer and moose populations in the Arctic to conserve the vegetation structure and biodiversity of the tundra.
The article is Open Access and you can find the full text here.
Reference: Ramirez, J.I., Sundqvist, M., Lindén, E., Björk, R.G., Forbes, B.C., Suominen, O., Tyler, T., Virtanen, R. and Olofsson, J. (2024), Reindeer grazing reduces climate-driven vegetation changes and shifts trophic interactions in the Fennoscandian tundra. Oikos e10595. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.10595
Text: Juan Ignacio Ramirez; Image generated by AI.