Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs 3.6 to 0.8 million years ago had climates resembling those forecasted under future warming. Palaeoclimatic records show strong polar amplification with mean annual temperatures of 11–19 °C above contemporary values. The biological communities inhabiting the Arctic during this time remain poorly known because fossils are rare. Here we report an ancient ...

A 24,000-year record of plant community dynamics, based on pollen and ancient DNA from the sediments (<i>seda</i>DNA) of Lake Bolshoye Shchuchye in the Polar Ural Mountains, provides detailed information on the flora of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and also changes in plant community composition and dominance. It greatly improves on incomplete records from short and fragmented stratigraphic sequences ...

Several decades of research on invasive marine species have yielded a broad understanding of the nature of species invasion mechanisms and associated threats globally. However, this is not true of the Arctic, a region where ongoing climatic changes may promote species invasion. Here, we evaluated risks associated with non-indigenous propagule loads discharged with ships' ballast water to the high-Arctic ...

Satellite-derived remote-sensing products are providing a modern circumpolar perspective of Arctic vegetation and its changes, but this new view is dependent on a long heritage of ground-based observations in the Arctic. Several products of the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna are key to our current understanding.Wereview aspects of the PanArctic Flora, the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation ...

While there are extensive macro‐ and microfossil records of a range of plants and animals from the Quaternary, earthworms and their close relatives amongst annelids are not preserved as fossils and therefore the knowledge of their past distributions is limited. This lack of fossils means that clitellate worms (Annelida) are currently underused in palaeoecological research, even though they can provide ...

Internal and external factors regulating the past composition of plant communities are difficult to identify in palaeo-vegetation records. Here, we develop an index of relative entropy of community assembly, which applies to changes in the composition of a community over time, measuring disorder in its assembly relative to disassembly. Historical periods of relatively ordered assembly (negative ...

1. Environmental DNA is increasingly being used to reconstruct past and present biodiversity including from freshwater ecosystems. Macrophytes are especially good environmental indicators, thus their environmental DNA palaeorecord might shed light on past postglacial environments.<p> <p>2. Here, we first review and compare studies that use metagenomics, targeted capture, and various barcoding ...

We analysed the pollen and spores extracted from 73 samples of lacustrine sediments from Colesdalen in Svalbard (Lake Tenndammen) as well as 10 soil samples collected from the lake’s shores. In total, 56 pollen taxa were recorded from the sediments spanning the last 800 years, whilst 35 pollen types were found in the soil samples. Pollen was categorised as (i) regional (from Svalbard); (ii) ...

<ul> <p><li>We provide the first comparative multispecies analysis of spatial genetic structure and diversity in the circumpolar Arctic using a common strategy for sampling and genetic analyses. We aimed to identify and explain potential general patterns of genetic discontinuity/connectivity and diversity, and to compare our findings with previously published hypotheses.</li></p> <p> <li>We ...