Publications
NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.
2021
Abstract
No abstract has been registered
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
Heavier rainstorms, more landslides, the winds howling more often, a longer summer… The good or bad of a warming climate! In this educational tool kit, your pupils will learn about northern climates, and possibly even sense it. Not the least, they will learn about climate changes in the north, which are not quite the same as in the south.
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
Even in the most pristine of northern Europe, we have lost almost all the long stretches of intact natural lands. We build and travel all over the place. The environmental problems it creates are unsustainable. In this tool kit, the students learn about the good and the bad of our consumption of nature, and are challenged to be conscious about both.
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
The Green Shift is like Jekyll & Hyde. Will it save the planet, or is it just greenwashing? In this tool kit, we try to get a practical grasp on this vague buzz-word. You will learn why 2+2 is never 4 in the green shift. The shadow side of it is still the same environmental issues as before. We reflect upon how the green shift indeed can be used to make changes, and not just greenwash our dirt.
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
When humans decided to conquer the world, we took on the responsibility to manage most wildlife. This is not an easy task. Ecosystems are so complex. People have so differing opinions. In this tool kit, you'll learn about wildlife management! About the easy theory and the struggling practice. And, what may happen if we give wildlife “back to nature”.
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
Technology has given humans a major upper-hand on other animal species. Here you will learn about ways in which humans use technology to monitor and manage wildlife, and we explore ethical dilemmas. For example, is it okay to catch and operate on wild animals? Do we want to know all the secrets of nature?
Authors
Hilde Karine WamAbstract
Will the toughness of tundra animals be their benefit or their bane in a changing climate? The tundra is a harsh and brutally cold place in winter, with almost no plants to eat. Only the toughest of creatures survive here. In this tool kit, we explore how climate change affects the tundra and its animals. We advice that pupils first do part 1 (animal adaptability).
Authors
Annika M. Felton Hilde Karine Wam Adam Felton Stephen J. Simpson Caroline Stolter Per-Ola Hedwall Jonas Malmsten Torsten Eriksson Mulualem Tigabo David RaubenheimerAbstract
At northern latitudes, large spatial and temporal variation in the nutritional composition of available foods poses challenges to wild herbivores trying to satisfy their nutrient requirements. Studies conducted in mostly captive settings have shown that animals from a variety of taxonomic groups deal with this challenge by adjusting the amounts and proportions of available food combinations to achieve a target nutrient balance. In this study, we used proportions-based nutritional geometry to analyze the nutritional composition of rumen samples collected in winter from 481 moose (Alces alces) in southern Sweden and examine whether free-ranging moose show comparable patterns of nutrient balancing. Our main hypothesis was that wild moose actively regulate their rumen nutrient composition to offset ecologically imposed variation in the nutritional composition of available foods. To test this, we assessed the macronutritional composition (protein, carbohydrates, and lipids) of rumen contents and commonly eaten foods, including supplementary feed, across populations with contrasting winter diets, spanning an area of approximately 10,000 km2. Our results suggest that moose balanced the macronutrient composition of their rumen, with the rumen contents having consistently similar proportional relationship between protein and nonstructural carbohydrates, despite differences in available (and eaten) foods. Furthermore, we found that rumen macronutrient balance was tightly related to ingested levels of dietary fiber (cellulose and hemicellulose), such that the greater the fiber content, the less protein was present in the rumen compared with nonstructural carbohydrates. Our results also suggest that moose benefit from access to a greater variety of trees, shrubs, herbs, and grasses, which provides them with a larger nutritional space to maneuver within. Our findings provide novel theoretical insights into a model species for ungulate nutritional ecology, while also generating data of direct relevance to wildlife and forest management, such as silvicultural or supplementary feeding practices.
Abstract
Management of Earth’s surface albedo is increasingly viewed as an important climate change mitigation strategy both on (Seneviratne et al., 2018) and off (Field et al., 2018; Kravitz et al., 2018) the land. Assessing the impact of a surface albedo change involves employing a measure like radiative forcing (RF) which can be challenging to digest for decision-makers who deal in the currency of CO2- equivalent emissions. As a result, many researchers express albedo change (1α) RFs in terms of their CO2-equivalent effects, despite the lack of a standard method for doing so, such as there is for emissions of well-mixed greenhouse gases (WMGHGs; e.g., IPCC AR5, Myhre et al., 2013). A major challenge for converting 1α RFs into their CO2-equivalent effects in a manner consistent with current IPCC emission metric approaches stems from the lack of a universal time dependency following the perturbation (perturbation “lifetime”). Here, we review existing methodologies based on the RF concept with the goal of highlighting the context(s) in which the resulting CO2-equivalent metrics may or may not have merit. To our knowledge this is the first review dedicated entirely to the topic since the first CO2-eq. metric for 1α surfaced 20 years ago. We find that, although there are some methods that sufficiently address the time-dependency issue, none address or sufficiently account for the spatial disparity between the climate response to CO2 emissions and 1α – a major critique of 1α metrics based on the RF concept (Jones et al., 2013). We conclude that considerable research efforts are needed to build consensus surrounding the RF “efficacy” of various surface forcing types associated with 1α (e.g., crop change, forest harvest), and the degree to which these are sensitive to the spatial pattern, extent, and magnitude of the underlying surface forcings.
Abstract
The decline of the Arctic cryosphere during recent decades has lowered the region’s surface albedo, reducing its ability to reflect solar radiation back to space. It is not clear what role the Antarctic cryosphere plays in this regard, but new remote-sensing-based techniques and datasets have recently opened the possibility to investigate its role. Here, we leverage these to show that the surface albedo reductions from sustained post-2000 losses in Arctic snow and ice cover equate to increasingly positive snow and ice albedo feedback relative to a 1982–1991 baseline period, with a decadal trend of +0.08 ± 0.04 W m–2 decade–1 between 1992 and 2015. During the same period, the expansion of the Antarctic sea-ice pack generated a negative feedback, with a decadal trend of −0.06 ± 0.02 W m–2 decade–1. However, substantial Antarctic sea-ice losses during 2016–2018 completely reversed the trend, increasing the three-year mean combined Arctic and Antarctic snow and ice albedo feedback to +0.26 ± 0.15 W m–2. This reversal highlights the importance of Antarctic sea-ice loss to the global snow and ice albedo feedback. The 1992–2018 mean feedback is equivalent to approximately 10% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions over the same period; the share may rise markedly should 2016–2018 snow and ice conditions become common, although increasing long-wave emissions will probably mediate the impact on the total radiative-energy budget.