The Arctic Environmental Problems - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 557

importance of links between soil biota and plant community structure in
determining nitrogen turnover in tundra ecosystems;

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activities of nitrifying and denitrifying microbes; and

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sensitivity of the snowbed plant communities to global change in the tundra
landscape.

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The biodiversity of the tundra as one of biocomplexity component is low: 1,700
species of vascular plants and only 48 species of land mammals can be found,
although millions of birds migrate there each year for the marshes. There are also a
few fish There are few species with large populations.

Notable animals in the Arctic tundra include caribou (reindeer), musk ox, arctic
hare, arctic fox, snowy owl, lemmings, and polar bears (only near ocean-fed bodies
of water). Tundra is largely devoid of poikilotherms such as frogs or lizards.
The tundra is a bleak and treeless place. Due to the harsh climate of the Arctic
tundra, regions of this kind have seen little human activity, even though they are
sometimes rich in natural resources such as oil and uranium. In recent times this has
begun to change in Alaska, Russia, and some other parts of the world.
The arctic tundra biome is the treeless fringe of land that surrounds the Arctic
Ocean. The terrestrial area of the arctic tundra biome, excluding glaciers and alpine
areas, cover about 5.15 million km 2 , an area about 3.4 % of the total land surface of
the world. Knowledge and understanding of the complex interactions between
climate, permafrost hydrology, and biological systems can help to assess the nature
of a rapidly changing climate, as well as to understand a character of the nonlinear
response of arctic systems to perturbations and to evaluate the magnitude and extent
of positive and negative feedback processes involved in such fey processes as heat,
CO 2 and water vapor exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere. In this
aspect, important problem is the parameterization of the dynamics of self organi-
zation in processes taking place in the arctic environment (Walker et al. 2008).
Arctic tundra region is characterized by the ubiquitous non-sorted circles that are
formed and persist as an ecosystem due to complex soil-water-energy-ice-plant
relationships and dynamics in the Arctic. Daanen et al. (2008) present model that
captures the dynamics of the physical and biological components of the non-sorted
circle ecosystem. This model helps to understand formation and persistence of this
ecosystem type, especially in a changing climatic environment. Principal structure
of the model is presented in Fig. 6.17 .
The assessment of arctic tundra ecosystem biocomplexity puts numerous prob-
lems that are solved in framework of different international and national arctic pro-
grams (Corliss 2002; Walker et al. 2008; Bobylev et al. 2003). For example, the
ACCSV project as part of the Land-Atmosphere

fish species such as the fl at

Ice Interactions (LAII) and Arctic
Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System (ATLAS) puts the following questions:

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1. How does the self-organization associated with frost boils occur?
2. How do the biological processes and climate change feed back to control the
formation of frost boils?
3. How does frost heave effect biogeochemical processes within and between the
frost boils?