Abstract
Northern ecosystems are undergoing major changes in response to amplified warming, including range migrations due to changing environmental constraints on species distributions. The circumpolar Arctic’s abundant freshwater ecosystems are highly sensitive to increasing temperatures as well as the effects of warming-induced changes in terrestrial catchment vegetation and soils. Here, we examine a 1400 km-long transect in Arctic and Subarctic Canada and show northward shifts in aquatic ecotones over the past ~ 25 years in response to accelerated regional warming.
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The limnological and environmental data on which this paper is based will be made available in the Borealis repository upon acceptance of the manuscript. Diatom samples from this research will be deposited in the CANA Phycology Collection and will be accessible through the archives of the Canadian Museum of Nature, National Museum of Natural History of Canada.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to C. Zimmermann and L. Cosyn Wexsteen for contributing to fieldwork and laboratory analyses, and to M. Simard for his advice and guidance. We also would like to thank the Centre for Northern Studies (CEN) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) for the logistic and the financial support and D. Belanger of the University of Montreal for facilitating the water chemistry analyses.
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All the authors contributed to data acquisition. All the authors wrote the main manuscript text, prepared Figs. 1 and 2 and reviewed it.
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Alibert, M., Pienitz, R. & Antoniades, D. Climate warming is shifting northern aquatic ecotones. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-37392-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-37392-3
