We have just posted a new video interview with Dr. Dorothee Ehrich (Dept. of Arctic and Marine Biology, University of Tromsø), and a researcher the Climate-ecological Observatory for Arctic Tundra COAT, where she works mostly with arctic foxes on the Varanger Peninsula, northern Norway but also with snow, red foxes, small rodents and other components of the tundra ecosystem affected by climate change. She has also worked extensively on the Yamal peninsula for many years.
Dr. Ehrich will be bringing her expertise in food webs into CHARTER Work Package 2. In the interview she talks about the importance of small rodents and prey populations in expanding our understandings of Arctic biodiversity in a time of climate change.
Fascinating content on the expanding of red foxes and corvids into the low Arctic, how to conduct fieldwork on small rodents (without killing them) and more. There is a also a nice short video here that she made with a colleague Eeva Soininen for Norway’s ‘Forskningsdagene’ on a windy day in Varanger where they demonstrated how cameras will can replace traps in counting small rodents such as lemmings and more. These new tools, and enhanced statistics will go a long way in increasing our understanding of what is going on in small rodent populations in winter, which until now, has been something of a black box…
Be sure to check our other video interviews here.