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Siberia experienced a prolonged heatwave in the spring of 2020, resulting in extreme summer drought and major wildfires in the North-Eastern Siberian lowland tundra. In the Arctic tundra, plants play a key role in regulating the summer land surface energy budget by contributing to land surface cooling through evapotranspiration. Yet we know little about how drought conditions impact land surface cooling by tundra plant communities, potentially contributing to high air temperatures through a positive plant-mediated feedback. Here we used high-resolution land surface temperature and vegetation maps based on drone imagery to determine the impact of an extreme summer drought on land surface cooling in the lowland tundra of North-Eastern Siberia. We found that land surface cooling differed strongly among plant communities between the drought year 2020 and the reference year 2021. Further, we observed a decrease in the normalized land surface cooling (measured as water deficit index) in the drought year 2020 across all plant communities. This indicates a shift towards an energy budget dominated by sensible heat fluxes, contributing to land surface warming. Overall, our findings suggest significant variation in land surface cooling among common Arctic plant communities in the North-Eastern Siberian lowland tundra and a pronounced effect of drought on all community types. Based on our results, we suggest discriminating between functional tundra plant communities when predicting the drought impacts on energy flux related processes such as land surface cooling, permafrost thaw and wildfires.

Shrubs are expanding across a warming Arctic, evident from range expansion and increases in biomass, stature and cover. This influences numerous aspects of Arctic ecosystems. While shrub growth is generally positively associated with summer temperature, tundra ecosystems are characterised by abiotic gradients on small spatial scales (metres), and the Arctic climate and its year-to-year variability are changing rapidly. Hence, it is often unclear to what extent climate-growth associations are scalable to future climate scenarios and across environmental gradients within ecosystems. Here, we investigate the stability of climate–growth associations of Arctic dwarf shrubs across small-scale (metre to kilometre) topographic gradients and decadal timescales. We constructed ring width series (1974–2018) for a common Arctic dwarf shrub (Betula nana) for three representative types of subsites in the Siberian lowland tundra: higher elevation, lower elevation and thermokarst-affected (thaw ponds) terrain. We quantified decadal variability in climate–growth associations across subsites using partial least squares regression and a moving window approach. We found consistently positive association of shrub radial growth with summer temperature, but substantial spatial and temporal variability in precipitation response. Association of shrub growth with summer rainfall increased in recent decades. Shrubs on elevated sites showed particularly strong response to rainfall following drier periods, and a negative association with recent snowfall extremes. Shrubs sampled from thaw ponds showed strong positive association with rainfall, followed by high shrub mortality after an extremely wet summer. This likely resulted from waterlogging due to thermokarst. Synthesis. Our findings imply that the response of shrub growth to changes in Arctic precipitation regimes is regulated by (i) macro- (kilometre-scale) and micro-topographical (metre-scale) gradients, (ii) colimitation between temperat

The data set includes the results of biogeochemical and sedimentary analyses on 4 sediment cores (69.5 cm - 113 cm) from two thermokarst lakes in Far East Siberia near the town of Chokurdakh. The analysis include lake depth measurements, linescan imaging, XRF scans, grainsize distribution, loss-on-ignition, porewater content, magnetic susceptibility, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration, sediment density, stable carbon isotope measurements of DOC and soil organic carbon and radiocarbon ages., The data set includes the results of biogeochemical and sedimentary analyses on 4 sediment cores (69.5 cm - 113 cm) from two thermokarst lakes in Far East Siberia near the town of Chokurdakh. The analysis include lake depth measurements, linescan imaging, XRF scans, grainsize distribution, loss-on-ignition, porewater content, magnetic susceptibility, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration, sediment density, stable carbon isotope measurements of DOC and soil organic carbon and radiocarbon ages.

Permafrost thaw can accelerate climate warming by releasing carbon from previously frozen soil in the form of greenhouse gases. Rainfall extremes have been proposed to increase permafrost thaw, but the magnitude and duration of this effect are poorly understood. Here we present empirical evidence showing that one extremely wet summer (+100 mm; 120% increase relative to average June–August rainfall) enhanced thaw depth by up to 35% in a controlled irrigation experiment in an ice-rich Siberian tundra site. The effect persisted over two subsequent summers, demonstrating a carry-over effect of extremely wet summers. Using soil thermal hydrological modelling, we show that rainfall extremes delayed autumn freeze-up and rainfall-induced increases in thaw were most pronounced for warm summers with mid-summer precipitation rainfall extremes. Our results suggest that, with rainfall and temperature both increasing in the Arctic, permafrost will likely degrade and disappear faster than is currently anticipated based on rising air temperatures alone.

The majority of climate models predict severe increases in future temperature and precipitation in the Arctic. Increases in temperature and precipitation can lead to an intensification of the hydrologic cycle that strongly impacts Arctic environmental conditions. In order to investigate effects of future precipitation scenarios on ecosystems, precipitation manipulation experiments are being performed to simulate drought and extreme precipitation conditions. However, most of the existing research so far has been unevenly distributed, primarily focusing on temperate grasslands and woodlands. Despite large changes in the predicted precipitation and potentially high sensitivity of the Arctic tundra ecosystem to these changes, it is among the most understudied ecosystems for precipitation manipulation experiments.

Background and aims: Permafrost degradation has the potential to change the Arctic tundra landscape. We observed rapid local thawing of ice-rich permafrost resulting in thaw pond formation, which was triggered by removal of the shrub cover in a field experiment. This study aimed to examine the rate of permafrost thaw and the initial vegetation succession after the permafrost collapse. Methods: In the experiment, we measured changes in soil thaw depth, plant species cover and soil subsidence over nine years (2007–2015). Results: After abrupt initial thaw, soil subsidence in the removal plots continued indicating further thawing of permafrost albeit at a much slower pace: 1 cm y−1 over 2012–2015 vs. 5 cm y−1 over 2007–2012. Grass cover strongly increased after the initial shrub removal, but later declined with ponding of water in the subsiding removal plots. Sedges established and expanded in the wetter removal plots. Thereby, the removal plots have become increasingly similar to nearby ‘natural’ thaw ponds. Conclusions: The nine years of field observations in a unique shrub removal experiment at a Siberian tundra site document possible trajectories of small-scale permafrost collapse and the initial stage of vegetation recovery, which is essential knowledge for assessing future tundra landscape changes.