Aim
Climate warming can alter the delicate balance between carbon uptake and release, with potentially strong negative impacts on global climate. The Arctic tundra stores large amounts of carbon in its soils, twice as much as is present in the atmosphere. At the same time, climate warming is more pronounced in Arctic regions, which are particularly vulnerable to these changes. To better understand and predict how carbon balance will respond to climatic changes, we are highly dependent on empirical studies in a large set of different ecosystems. For this purpose, we build this database on both ecosystem respiration and methane fluxes and biotic and abiotic data from open-top chamber and snow manipulation experiments in arctic and alpine tundra. The database consists to this date of 171 datasets from 75 different site locations.
We want to use this data to disentangle the large variability in the response of carbon fluxes to warming in different ecosystems and build the bases for developing realistic models that can ultimately predict carbon releases in arctic and alpine tundra with climate warming.
