borearc

The project Borealization of the Finnish Subarctic (BOREARC) aims to identify the conditions in which biome shifts occur and to which direction. The focus is on climatic factors, natural disturbances (insect outbreaks) and traditional land-uses (reindeer herding). The four-year project is funded by the Academy of Finland with a total sum of 700 000 € and lead by Sari Stark from the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland and Tuomas Aakala from the University of Eastern Finland.

Field measurements

There are 619 study sites, each of which has 10 vegetation plots. The habitat types of the areas are boreal forests, tundra and mountain birch forests.

The northern parts of Finland are in the subarctic biome, where the main vegetation types are mountain birch forests and treeless tundra. However, the vegetation regimes are shifting towards higher latitudes and altitudes as the climate and growing conditions are changing. In the Fennoscandian north there are four main types of changes observed:

1. tundra replaced by mountain birch forests
2. tundra replaced by coniferous forests
3. mountain birch forests replaced by coniferous forests
4. mountain birch forests replaced by open tundra.

Regime shifts take place in areas with their own unique natural, cultural and societal history and follow changing disturbance regimes that push ecosystems to varying post-disturbance successional pathways. Figure by Tuomas Aakala.

Sari Stark is a university researcher at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, who investigates soil carbon and nitrogen cycling in tundra ecosystems and boreal and subarctic forests with special emphasis on soil decomposer microorganisms that are responsible for litter and soil organic matter decomposition. Recently the focus has been in studying effects of global change on northern ecosystems at different levels of grazing intensity, and how plant and soil responses interact to form ecosystem carbon balance that links back to global climate. sari.stark@ulapland.fi

Tuomas Aakala is an associate professor at the University of Eastern Finland in the faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology. tuomas.aakala@uef.fi | +358 50 351 1476

Henri Wallen is a researcher at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland. He is specialized in quantitative models, bayesian statistics, spatial data and analytics, machine learning etc.