Herbivores modify arctic vegetation and can counteract some of the climate-change driven increases in shrub cover and treeline advance induced by climate-change in the tundra. However, the effects of herbivores on plants and ecosystem structure and function vary across the Arctic and seem to depend on the environmental conditions under which herbivory takes place. Therefore, studies in one location can lead to different results than studies in another location, and generalizing the impacts of herbivores becomes difficult. Our systematic map assessed how well the existing literature of herbivore impacts on vegetation covers the environmental variation in the Arctic, to understand how robust are the conclusions that we can make about the effects of herbivores across the tundra biome. Our results show that herbivory research is concentrated in parts of the Arctic that are warmer, wetter, near the coast and that have experienced a moderate increase in temperature. The current evidence base might thus provide an incomplete picture of the effects of herbivores on Arctic vegetation throughout the region.
The database of studies of herbivore effects on arctic vegetation is available through an interactive visualization tool (Arctic Herbivory Systematic Map) that allows exploration of individual environmental variables and the coded data.
This systematic map has been a large effort led by Eeva Soininen. You can find the paper here.
Reference: Soininen, E.M., Barrio, I.C., Bjørkås, R., Björnsdóttir, K., Ehrich, D., Hopping, K.A., Kaarlejärvi, E., Kolstad, A.L., Abdulmanova, S., Björk, R.G.,, Bueno, C.G., Eischeid, I.,, Finger-Higgens, R., Forbey, J.S., Gignac, C., Gilg, O.,, den Herder, M., Holm, H.S., Hwang, B.C., Jepsen, J.U., Kamenova, S.,, Kater, I., Koltz, A.M.,, Kristensen, J.A.,, Little, C.J., Macek, P.,, Mathisen, K.M., Metcalfe, D.B.,, Mosbacher, J.B., Mörsdorf, M., Park, T.,, Propster, J.R.,, Roberts, A.J., Serrano, E., Spiegel, M.P., Tamayo, M., Tuomi, M.W., Verma, M., Vuorinen, K.E.M., Väisänen, M., van der Wal, R., Wilcots, M.E., Yoccoz, N.G., Speed, J. D. (2021). Location of studies and evidence of effects of herbivory on Arctic vegetation: a systematic map. Environmental Evidence, 10:25. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13750-021-00240-0