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Keith Larson
(Project Coordinator)

Director of the Arctic Centre at Umeå University

Climate Impacts Research Centre
Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences

Background

I have spent my career working as an ecologist, travelling the world and experiencing the impacts of climate and environmental change on species and ecosystems. Today, I am the Director of the Arctic Centre at Umeå University, where I lead the university’s largest inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative research environment. My research collaborations include diverse international researchers focused on climate change impacts on Arctic and alpine plant communities, pollination (bumblebees) networks and bird communities that cause mismatches between the timing of key life history events.

The desire to create greater societal impacts recently led me to a successful transdisciplinary collaboration with political scientists, plant ecologists, and Sámi indigenous people. The project seeks to integrate local indigenous knowledge to disentangle the impacts of climate warming from socio-economic forces leading to the expansion of trees and shrubs in the mountainous indigenous Sámi reindeer grazing lands of northern Scandinavia.

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I am passionate about teaching in both the field and classroom context and have developed undergraduate and post-graduate courses. Importantly, Science communications and public engagement in science are strong features of my work. In Abisko, I have developed a public outreach and citizen science program to increase the public’s awareness of climate change, how scientists conduct their science, and the role science plays in dealing with humanity's most important issues. The best approach to dealing with global threats such as environmental change is working together inclusively. This approach requires evidence-based decision-making based on the best science available. I regularly collaborate with journalists, filmmakers, and artists from across the globe confronting the environmental crisis.

Research Interests

I find life (and living) in extreme environments fascinating. Many species that live at high elevations and latitudes do so because they have specific adaptions to these environments. Many show great flexibility for a large range of ecological conditions, while others require quite narrow ones.

I am interested in how life history adaptations in Arctic and alpine species are shaped by the environment. Further, how the timing of life history events, i.e. phenology (nature's calendar), are affected by changing climate and environmental conditions. For example, comparing resident and migratory birds’ ability to time their breeding activities with the local conditions on the breeding grounds.... Many migrant birds in Scandinavia migrate great distances from their over-wintering grounds in Africa. Because migrants can get no local information about breeding ground conditions and the timing of spring, we might predict that resident species are more plastic to changes in environmental conditions, while the timing of events for migrants is shaped by natural selection. Logically, do earlier springs and warmer winter conditions result in phenological mismatches for the migrants?

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How do species at the borders of their ranges deal with climate and environmental change? For example, what happens to species and populations at the shifting ecotone between the Boreal and the Arctic or the forest treeline and tundra or alpine? Where do “Arctic” species at their southern range-limits or alpine species at their elevational limits disperse, do they adapt, or do they go locally extinct? Finally, what happens when previously separated populations or closely related species meet as climates change shifting distributions? Comparing the results of historical studies to today can provide many insights into these problems.

My current research focuses on comparing research conducted on plants in mountain regions over 100 years ago, before modern human-caused climate change, to the conditions found today. It is with this “time machine” approach that he and other scientists can measure change that has already taken place due to climate change and predict what maybe the future for earth’s species and ecosystems. Currently, I collaborate with a group of diverse interdisciplinary international researchers from Sweden, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and Germany.