Plant functional traits

Vegetation composition and structure forms an important mediator in most large-scale ecosystem processes. Understanding how vegetation mediates carbon dynamics and albedo for example, is especially important in the fast-warming high arctic. Plant functional traits (PFTs) are a highly useful and generalizable tool to model such change, but detailed information on such traits, specifically belowground traits, is severely limited in the high arctic regions. For this proposed project, I aim to measure above- and belowground PFTs on the most dominant species representing the different vegetation types that will be accessible during the SEES2020 expedition.