Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

Arctic areas are experiencing amplified climate warming that proceeds twice as fast as the global temperature increase. The rising temperature is already causing evident alterations, e.g. changes in the vegetation cover as well as thawing of permafrost. Climate warming and the concomitant biotic and abiotic changes are likely to have strong direct and indirect effects on the production and emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from arctic ecosystems. We have used long-term field manipulation experiments to assess effects of climate change on tundra VOC emissions. In these experiments, we have observed emission increases by a factor of 2-5 under experimental warming, and this strong temperature response has also been confirmed by ecosystem-scale data. In this talk, I present our recent findings on how VOC emissions in high latitude ecosystems are affected by permafrost thaw, insect herbivory and climate change.