Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Polar and boreal ecosystems are experiencing unprecedented human-induced impacts, both directly (industrial development) and indirectly (climate change). Such perturbations raises questions with respect to the fate of arctic predators, and to the functioning of arctic food webs subject to global disturbances. To unravel the key mechanisms of changes, the International Polar Year demonstrated the importance of long-term studies to detect the direction of change, combined with short-term studies of mechanisms, together with broad-scale approaches to assess the generality of these mechanisms. With the intensity of perturbations in the Arctic, the Chair is devoted to investigate such critical questions.