A rapid assessment technique for quantifying change in land cover and carbon balance in arctic tundra

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Funds are provided to develop and verify a technique to rapidly assess decadal-scale change in land cover and carbon balance in arctic tundra. Recent and persistent changes in climate in the Arctic are amongst the most dramatic on the globe. Understanding how changes in ecosystem productivity interact and potentially offset the balance and stability of the Arctic soil carbon reservoir is of utmost importance to global change science. Subtle changes in plant species and communities, which underlie land cover change, have increasingly been related to dramatic shifts in ecosystem function, such as the exchange of carbon across the land-atmosphere boundary. Land cover change represents a time-integrated response and shift in the competitive interaction between species responding to an altered biological, chemical and/or physical state. This project will utilize newly acquired satellite imagery to derive extant land cover maps and retrospectively construct land cover maps from historical air photos and declassified military spy imagery. Empirical spatially, and land cover, explicit models of ecosystem carbon balance will be run over the time series of land cover maps to indicate probable decadal-scale changes in carbon balance. Ground truth for derived products will result from observations at the former site of the International Biological Program near Barrow, which remains relatively intact and where an extensive research history of decadal-scale changes in ecosystem structure and function exists.