The University of New Mexico (UNM) recently announced a research collaboration aimed at expanding the understanding of climate change impacts on food webs, particularly in high-latitude ecosystems. The findings suggest that climate change is significantly affecting ecosystems in the Arctic tundra and boreal forests, regions where fauna are adapted to extreme cold winter temperatures.
This collaborative research includes contributions from the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, UNM's Center for Stable Isotopes (CSI), the UNM Museum of Southwestern Biology, and the University of Texas at Austin. Co-authors Nolan Perryman, Joe Cook, Seth Newsome, and Amanda Koltz focused their study on two key consumer groups—small mammals in boreal forests over three decades (1990 to 2021) and wolf spiders in the Arctic tundra exposed to warming experiments. The study utilized stable isotope analysis on museum specimens, according to a press release by UNM.
"Small mammals like shrews and voles that were historically supported by 'green' plant-based food webs now acquire almost all their energy from 'brown' fungal food webs," said Manlick in a press release by UNM. "When we looked at experimentally warmed spiders from the Arctic tundra, we saw the same pattern in a controlled environment. This tells us that warming has a consistent 'browning' effect on food webs across species and ecosystems and that museums and monitoring programs can be used to track changes in food webs."
Established in 2014, the University of New Mexico Center for Stable Isotopes (UNM-CSI) is a nonprofit research laboratory supporting stable isotope research across various disciplines. According to information provided by UNM on the UNM-CSI webpage, it offers affordable access to advanced analytical instruments for measuring stable isotope ratios in different substrates. In addition to this, it provides hands-on training programs for students and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration in applying stable isotopes in planetary, life, and medical sciences at UNM and beyond.
