Author: isabel

ABC 2014 meeting and conference session

The Herbivory Network organized a side meeting and chaired a scientific session during the Arctic Biodiversity Congress in Trondheim, in December 2014.  The aim of these activities was to advance the development of a general, standardized protocol for measuring herbivory in tundra ecosystems in arctic and alpine environments, and to strengthen communication with the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP).

Side meeting

The side meeting identified the main challenges in the development of a general protocol to measure herbivory and established the next steps for achieving this goal. Overall, there was a broad agreement among the side meeting participants on the need of collaborative efforts to address herbivory questions across different sites and at different spatial scales, and thus the necessity of implementing common protocols to monitor herbivory and its impacts on tundra ecosystems.  Two main overarching research questions will guide the development of the protocol:

• QUESTION 1. How do herbivores affect tundra vegetation? What causes temporal and spatial variation in the outcomes of plant-herbivore interactions?
• QUESTION 2. How do herbivores modulate the responses of tundra vegetation to environmental change?

Scientific session: “How to approach collaborative research on herbivory: an ecological interaction of key importance”

The scientific session included expert talks focusing on main groups of herbivores in these systems (i.e. mammals, birds, insects), long-term ongoing monitoring efforts and comprehensive monitoring programs, and a final round table discussion.

• The Hudson Bay Project – 20 years of collaboration to characterize the effects of goose herbivory in Hudson Bay (Ken Abraham)
• Registering mammalian herbivory in plant communities (Kari Anne Bråthen)
• Arctic insect herbivory: current knowledge and future directions (Toke Høye)
• Herbivory and the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (Jason Taylor)

You can find the meeting report here.

Herbivory in changing northern and alpine ecosystems

The workshop ‘Herbivory in changing northern and alpine ecosystems’ was held April 9, 2014 in Helsinki, as part of the Arctic Science Summit Week 2014 and the Arctic Observing Summit. 

The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers to investigate the role of herbivory in changing northern and alpine ecosystems across large spatial scales, with the goal of laying the foundation for a plant-herbivore interaction-focused research network.  32 researchers from different circum-arctic regions attended this meeting.  Overall, there was a broad agreement on the need to consolidate such a research network that, in addition to serving as a platform for communication and exchange among researchers, should be focused on developing common research interests. A fair amount of time during the workshop was devoted to defining a common conceptual model, identifying the knowledge gaps of the field and formulating an overarching research question that a collaborative effort may be able to answer. For addressing this question a common, standardized protocol is needed, based on a well-replicated, relatively simple experimental design. The first steps towards this protocol were defined during the workshop. Other points were also discussed at the meeting, including the possibility of writing a multi-authored opinion paper on the workshop outcomes, further development of a manuscript that was presented at the meeting, and the possibility of a joint funding application.

Related documents

• workshop report
• workshop notes

A summary of the workshop was published in Ecosistemas, the scientific journal of the Spanish Association for Terrestrial Ecology (AEET). You can access the paper here (in Spanish).

Funding for the workshop was provided by:

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