Assessing the Arctic: The Arctic is experiencing some of the most rapid climate change currently under way across the globe, but consequent ecological responses have not been widely reported. At the close of the Fourth International Polar Year, Post et al. (p. 1355 ) review observations on ecological impacts in this sensitive region. The widespread changes occurring in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems, presage changes at lower latitudes that will affect natural resources, food production, and future climate buffering.

After a decade with nine of the lowest arctic sea-ice minima on record, including the historically low minimum in 2012, we synthesize recent developments in the study of ecological responses to sea-ice decline. Sea-ice loss emerges as an important driver of marine and terrestrial ecological dynamics, influencing productivity, species interactions, population mixing, gene flow, and pathogen and disease transmission. Major challenges in the near future include assigning clearer attribution to sea ice as a primary driver of such dynamics, especially in terrestrial systems, and addressing pressures arising from human use of arctic coastal and near-shore areas as sea ice diminishes.

In highly seasonal environments, offspring production by vertebrates is timed to coincide with the annual peak of resource availability. For herbivores, this resource peak is represented by the annual onset and progression of the plant growth season. As plant phenology advances in response to climatic warming, there is potential for development of a mismatch between the peak of resource demands by reproducing herbivores and the peak of resource availability. For migratory herbivores, such as caribou, development of a trophic mismatch is particularly likely because the timing of their seasonal migration to summer ranges, where calves are born, is cued by changes in day length, while onset of the plant-growing season on the same ranges is cued by local temperatures. Using data collected since 1993 on timing of calving by caribou and timing of plant growth in West Greenland, we document the consequences for reproductive success of a developing trophic mismatch between caribou and their forage plants. As mean spring temperatures at our study site have risen by more than 4°C, caribou have not kept pace with advancement of the plant-growing season on their calving range. As a consequence, offspring mortality has risen and offspring production has dropped fourfold.

If controls over primary productivity and plant community composition are mainly environmental, as opposed to biological, then global change may result in large-scale alterations in ecosystem structure and function. This view appears to be favored among investigations of plant biomass and community responses to experimental and observed warming. In far northern and arctic ecosystems, such studies predict increasing dominance of woody shrubs with future warming and emphasize the carbon (C)-sequestration potential and consequent atmospheric feedback potential of such responses. In contrast to previous studies, we incorporated natural herbivory by muskoxen and caribou into a 5-year experimental investigation of arctic plant community response to warming. In accordance with other studies, warming increased total community biomass by promoting growth of deciduous shrubs (dwarf birch and gray willow). However, muskoxen and caribou reduced total community biomass response, and responses of birch and willow, to warming by 19%, 46%, and 11%, respectively. Furthermore, under warming alone, the plant community shifted after 5 years away from graminoid-dominated toward dwarf birch-dominated. In contrast, where herbivores grazed, plant community composition on warmed plots did not differ from that on ambient plots after 5 years. These results highlight the potentially important and overlooked influences of vertebrate herbivores on plant community response to warming and emphasize that conservation and management of large herbivores may be an important component of mitigating ecosystem response to climate change.

Climatic warming is associated with organisms breeding earlier in the season than is typical for their species. In some species, however, response to warming is more complex than a simple advance in the timing of all life history events preceding reproduction. Disparities in the extent to which different components of the reproductive phenology of organisms vary with climatic warming indicate that not all life history events are equally responsive to environmental variation. Here, we propose that our understanding of phenological response to climate change can be improved by considering entire sequences of events comprising the aggregate life histories of organisms preceding reproduction. We present results of a two‐year warming experiment conducted on 33 individuals of three plant species inhabiting a low‐arctic site. Analysis of phenological sequences of three key events for each species revealed how the aggregate life histories preceding reproduction responded to warming, and which individual events exerted the greatest influence on aggregate life history variation. For alpine chickweed (Cerastium alpinum), warming elicited a shortening of the duration of the emergence stage by 2.5 days on average, but the aggregate life history did not differ between warmed and ambient plots. For gray willow (Salix glauca), however, all phenological events monitored occurred earlier on warmed than on ambient plots, and warming reduced the aggregate life history of this species by 22 days on average. Similarly, in dwarf birch (Betula nana), warming advanced flower bud set, blooming, and fruit set and reduced the aggregate life history by 27 days on average. Our approach provides important insight into life history responses of many organisms to climate change and other forms of environmental variation. Such insight may be compromised by considering changes in individual phenological events in isolation.