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Issue Title: Special Issue: Science Results from the Canadian International Polar Year 2007-2008 Tundra and taiga ecosystems comprise nearly 40 % of the terrestrial landscapes of Canada. These permafrost ecosystems have supported humans for more than 4500 years, and are currently home to ca. 115,000 people, the majority of whom are First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The responses of these ecosystems to the regional warming over the past 30-50 years were the focus of four Canadian IPY projects. Northern residents and researchers reported changes in climate and weather patterns and noted shifts in vegetation and other environmental variables. In forest-tundra areas tree growth and reproductive effort correlated with...
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Ecosystem responses to the increasing warming in recent decades across North America (NA) are spatially heterogeneous and partly uncertain. Here we examined the spatial and temporal variability of warming across different eco-regions of NA using long-term (1979–2010) climate data (North America Regional Reanalysis (NARR)) with 3-hourly time-step and 0.25° × 0.25° spatial resolution and run a comprehensive mathematical process model, ecosys to study the impacts of this variability in warming on gross primary productivity (GPP). In a site scale test of model results, annual GPP modeled for pixels which corresponded to the locations of 20 eddy covariance flux towers correlated well (R2 = 0.76) with annual GPP derived...
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