Category: meetings

We had a successful meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in September, 2016. A total of 34 HN members joined us from Scandinavia, England, Russia, Canada, and the U.S. The agenda of the meeting was to launch new collaborative projects, to strengthen the ongoing ones, and to form strategies for steering and research collaboration within the network.

During the meeting, we discussed the following projects:

• An assessment of the functional diversity of herbivore assemblages across the Arctic led by James Speed. This work follows from the Barrio et al. (2016) data material and aims to summarize the functional groups and phylogenetic diversity of arctic herbivores.
• A systematic review on the effects of herbivores on tundra soils led by the soil working group (Maria Väisänen, Guillermo Bueno, Maria Tuomi and Francis Brearley). This work will revise the current knowledge on the impacts of herbivores on tundra soils through literature search. A report of this workshop will be soon uploaded to the HN website.
• Identification of data gaps in tundra herbivory research led by Eeva Soininen, James Speed and Jennifer Forbey. Eeva and James are developing a systematic protocol that aims to create a systematic map of the conducted herbivory research. Jennifer will lead a review on what kind of paradigms have been prominent in herbivory research for the last decades.
• The assessment on the effects of historical grazing within tundra sites led by Martin Mörsdorf. In the workshop discussion on the methods in defining historical grazing effects within tundra study sites was initiated, which could be developed into a protocol during the next meetings.

At the end of the meeting we concluded that the Herbivory Network should continue to be an open, active network, where members are encouraged to take active roles in developing new initiatives and networking opportunities.

You can find the workshop report here.

Funding for this workshop was provided by:

We organised a workshop on herbivory during the 21st ITEX meeting in Uppsala. The aim of the workshop was to discuss the impacts of herbivory, both by vertebrate and invertebrate herbivores, within experimental warming manipulations. Discussions were guided by an outline that was made available to participants before the workshop. As a result of the workshop we are now working on a draft on current knowledge and future challenges in understanding the role of herbivory in modulating the responses of tundra plants to warming, with a special focus on integrating herbivores into warming experiments. The workshop was organized by Johan Olofsson, Isabel C Barrio and Ingibjörg Svala Jónsdóttir.

Workshop agenda – Friday Sept 18, 2015 (10:00 – 12:20)

10:00	Herbivory in the Arctic, the past, the present and the future? Johan Olofsson
10:20	Herbivory in ITEX: standardized protocols and progress since last ITEX meeting. Isabel C Barrio
10:25	Presentation of the workshop: plan and expected outcomes
10:30	Coffee break
10:40	Discussion groups
12:00	Wrap-up and conclusions
12:20	Reporting to participants in other workshops

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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