Studying sanderlings in Greenland, videos

This is a series of ten videos about studying sanderlings in Greenland, by Dutch biologists Jeroen Reneerkens and Stefan Sand, doing research about sanderlings in the Zackenberg area in north-east Greenland in 2012.

Bad 2018 Greenland sanderlings nesting season: here.

The 2018 snow conditions resulted in the most complete reproductive failure ever encountered at Zackenberg, and only few plants and animals were able to reproduce due to abundant and late-melting snow. While poor reproduction had been observed in individual species before, such poor reproduction across all levels of the ecosystem had never been seen. “One non-breeding year is hardly that bad for high-arctic species,” says Niels Martin Schmidt (Aarhus University, Denmark), lead author of the study. “The worrying perspective is that 2018 may offer a peep into the future, where increased climatic variability may push the arctic species to — and potentially beyond — their limits. Our study shows that climate change is more than ‘just’ warming, and that ecosystems may be hard hit by currently still rare but extreme events. What it also brings out is the unparalleled value of long-term observations of the Arctic. Only by keeping an eye on full arctic ecosystems can we understand the havoc brought by the changing climate”: here.

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