Current projections suggest that an additional 120 million ha – an area twice the size of France or one-third that of India – will be needed to support the traditional growth in food production by 2030, mainly in developing countries (FAO, 2003), without considering the compensation required for certain losses. The demand for irrigated land is projected to increase by 56% in Sub- Saharan Africa (from 4.5 to 7 million ha), and rainfed land b...

Increase in crop production has mainly been a function of increases in yield due to increased irrigation and fertilizer use. However, this may change in the future towards more reliance on cropland expansion, at the cost of biodiversity. (Source: FAO, 2006).

A central component in preventing loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, such as provisioning of water, from expanding agricultural production is to limit the trade-off between economic growth and biodiversity by stimulating agricultural productivity and more efficient land use. Further enhancement of agricultural productivity (‘closing the yield gap’) is the key factor in reducing the need for land and, consequently, the rate of bio...

Temperate forests are active carbon sinks and deforestation in the temperate zone has largely stopped. Where demand for land and/or water allows, reforestation would enable carbon sequestration and could provide other benefits including higher biodiversity and recreation opportunities.

As climate change alters Arctic ecosystems and enables greater human activity, biological invasions are likely to increase in the Arctic. To some extent, Arctic terrestrial ecosystems may be predisposed to invasion because many invasive plants are adapted to open disturbed areas. Range map scenarios developed for 16 highly invasive plants either occurring in or at risk of invading Alaska also paint a sobering outlook for the future. This map dep...

Data from many sources and at several scales suggest that recent climate change is already affecting terrestrial Arctic ecosystems. Comparisons of historical and contemporary aerial photographs provide evidence that Arctic vegetation has already undergone significant shifts in recent decades, foreshadowing changes that are likely to come. In a repeated measurement study conducted on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, over a period of 13 years, t...

The Arctic Council study on trends in the polar ecosystems - the Arctic Biodiversity Assessment (ABA) focuses on the areas displayed in this map. The high- and low Arctic regions are defined from the bioclimatic zones in the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM), while the sub-Arctic zone is the area definition that has been used int he Arctic Council.

The Arctic contains a variety of types of lakes but overall, it is thermokarst lakes and ponds that are the most abundant and productive aquatic ecosystems in the Arctic. They are found extensively in the lowland regions of western and northern Alaska, Canada and Siberia. These (i.e., thaw) lakes are most commonly formed by the thaw of ice-rich permafrost, which leads to the collapse of ground levels and ponding of surface water in the depression...

Over recent years, the southern limit of permafrost in northern peatlands has retreated by 39 km on average and by as much as 200 km in some parts of the Canadian Arctic. Although regional warming by 1.32°C has accelerated permafrost thaw in northern Manitoba, Canada, these changes are not exclusively linked to temperature rise. The loss of permafrost in Quebec has been attributed to the insulating effect of increased snowfall since the late 1950...

A false color Quickbird-2 satellite image of a portion of the Bovanenkovo Gas Field on the Yamal Peninsula in West Siberia. Image acquired 4 July 2004. The construction phase began in the late 1980s. From that period onward there remain visible signs of extensive off-road vehicle traffic across the terrain. Many of those tracks have naturally revegetated and now appear as bright red, indicating dense grass- and sedge-dominated vegetation. The roa...

Protected areas have long been viewed as a key element for maintaining and conserving Arctic biodiversity and the functioning landscapes upon which species depend. Arctic protected areas have been established in strategically important and representative areas, helping to maintain crucial ecological features, e.g., caribou migration and calving areas, shorebird and waterfowl staging and nesting sites, seabird colonies, and critical components of ...

The Arctic contains a variety of types of lakes but overall, it is thermokarst lakes and ponds that are the most abundant and productive aquatic ecosystems in the Arctic. They are found extensively in the lowland regions of western and northern Alaska, Canada and Siberia. These (i.e., thaw) lakes are most commonly formed by the thaw of ice-rich permafrost, which leads to the collapse of ground levels and ponding of surface water in the depression...

Wild reindeer and caribou, Rangifer tarandus, are widely distributed around the circumpolar Arctic where they play a key role in the environment, culture, and economy of the region. One of the two major wild reindeer populations in west Greenland has declined from about 45,000 to 35,000 between 2001 and 2005, while the trend for the second major herd is uncertain. From a management and biological perspective, however, it may be desirable to redu...

Biological invasions are known from around the globe but are relatively less known or studied in the Arctic. This secondary migration of invasives complicates ecological interactions as naturally occurring species from areas adjacent to the Arctic are also expanding their ranges northward. Another study found that the rate of marine invasion is increasing; that most reported invasions are by crustaceans and molluscs; and, importantly, that most i...

Language not only communicates, it defines culture, nature, history, humanity, and ancestry. The indigenous languages of the Arctic have been formed and shaped in close contact with their environment. They are a valuable source of information and a wealth of knowledge on human interactions with nature is encoded in these languages. If a language is lost, a world is lost. This deep knowledge and interconnectedness is expressed in Arctic song, subs...

Shorebirds are the most diverse group of Arctic breeding birds and one of the most abundant. From the Arctic, they migrate to their non-breeding grounds along well-defined flyways that circle the world. As a group, however, their recent conservation status has been unfavorable. Trend data are only available for 65 of the 112 breeding shorebird populations that are wholly or largely confined to the Arctic. Of these, 35 populations (54%) are in d...

Polar bears occur in 19 relatively discrete subpopulations with an estimated worldwide abundance of 20,000– 25,000 animals. Our knowledge of the status and trend of each subpopulation varies due to availability, reliability, and age of data. Furthermore, for many subpopulations, there is limited or no data collected over a sufficient period of time to examine trends. Based on a 2009 review of the worldwide status of polar bears, one of 19 subpopu...

Annual rates of population change of individual murre colonies during 12 years after the 1977 climatic regime shift in the North Pacific and during 9 years after the 1989 shift, in relation to changes in sea surface temperatures around the colonies from one decadal regime to the next. Population data are from 32 U. aalge and 21 U. lomvia colonies, encompassing the entire circumpolar region. Ten sites supported both species, so 43 different study...

The two species of murres (known as guillemots in Europe), the thick-billed murre, Uria lomvia, and common murre, Uria aalge, both have circumpolar distributions, breeding in Arctic, sub-Arctic, and temperate seas from California and northern Spain to northern Greenland, high Arctic Canada, Svalbard, and Novaya Zemlya. The thick-billed murre occurs mostly in Arctic waters, while the common murre, although overlapping extensively with the thick-bi...

The common eider, Somateria mollissima, has a circumpolar distribution breeding mainly on small islands in Arctic and boreal marine areas in Alaska (Bering Sea region), Canada, Greenland, Iceland, western Europe, and the Barents Sea region. In Russia, there is a gap in distribution along the mainland coast from the Yugorski Peninsula (Kara Sea) to Chaunskaya Bay in east Siberia (Figure 5.1). Important wintering areas include the Gulf of Alaska/Be...