How to survive winter? Adaptation and acclimation strategies of eukaryotic algae in polar terrestrial ecosystems
Abstract
The polar regions are of outstanding international scientific and environmental significance as they support important components of the global biogeochemical cycles. They comprise a whole range of habitats with extreme environmental conditions, which challenge living organisms with multiple environmental stresses.
At the same time, they are vulnerable to disturbances and have long recovery times (Robinson et al., 2003; Elster & Benson, 2004; Thomas et al., 2008). Moreover, the Arctic is especially undergoing a particularly rapid climate change compared to the rest of the planet, including changes in temperature and precipitation (Thomas et al., 2008).
However, predicting the impacts of climate change on arctic ecosystems is difficult (Bokhorst et al., 2015), because (i) climate change is not uniform across the Arctic (AMAP, 2011), and (ii) at local and regional scales, ecosystem responses to warming are not necessarily the same due to variations driven by other biotic and climatic factors (Post et al., 2009; Callaghan et al., 2013). Warming of the Arctic is also expected to result in an increasing frequency of stochastic climatic events (Saha et al., 2006; Bokhorst et al., 2009, 2011, 2015; Callaghan et al., 2013; Bjerke et al., 2014), such as extreme winter warming.