Ragnhild Gya

Background. Attrition from STEM programs remains a persistent challenge for universities globally. To better support student success and socio-academic integration, universities have developed a range of curricular and co-curricular resources. Much emphasis has been placed on the benefits of these resources; however, less is known about how students recognize, access, and realize these benefits. Guided by a capital-mediated agency model, this asset-based focus group study examined how university-provided resources support undergraduate STEM students’ use of capital. We conducted four parallel focus groups with 21 students at a Norwegian university and analyzed narratives using thematic analysis. Results. Students described using both curricular and co-curricular resources to build personal/emotional, social, and human resource capital that helped them navigate academic and personal challenges. Curricular resources, including mandatory assignments, fieldwork, and laboratory activities, supported disciplinary training and opportunities to develop relationships with peers. Co-curricular resources, including tutoring rooms and student organizations, similarly provided academic and emotional support. Although students often initially accessed resources to address academic challenges, they frequently described emergent social benefits. Recognition of these social benefits appeared to link resource use with decisions to invest in them. Across participants’ accounts, social capital and sense of belonging appeared to operate reciprocally: relationships formed through resource engagement fostered belonging, while belonging strengthened students’ willingness and capacity to continue engaging with peers, resources, and their academic communities. Conclusions. These findings extend the capital-mediated agency model by identifying students’ recognition of resource benefits as a meaningful process linking their use to investment. They also position students’ sense of belonging as an emergent and reciprocal outcome of engagement with both primarily academic and social resources. For institutions and instructors, the findings suggest that simply providing resources may be insufficient and that students must be able to recognize their relevance, access them, and use them in ways that generate meaningful academic and, critically, social outcomes. Designing and evaluating university resources to support these processes and build social capital may create learning environments that better support student agency, resilience, belonging, and persistence in STEM.

Biology education aims to enable citizens to make evidence-based decisions on both societal and personal levels; for example the biodiversity crisis we are currently facing and to take care of our ...

Climate change can impact ecosystem carbon cycling directly by altering kinetic rates of biological processes and indirectly through climate‐induced changes in the functional composition of the plant community. Species dominance and complementarity are posed as important mechanisms underlying community regulation of ecosystem processes. Assessing processes regulating ecosystem carbon exchange along climatic gradients can provide crucial knowledge for understanding how carbon cycling can be affected by climate change. Our study was conducted in twelve semi‐natural grasslands spanning broad temperature and precipitation gradients. At each site, we conducted extensive measurements of net ecosystem exchange (NEE), gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (R _eco ). We measured plant functional traits related to plant size and the leaf economics spectrum at each site and computed community‐weighted mean trait values (CWM) to characterize the effect of dominant traits and various diversity measures (richness, diversity, evenness and functional dispersion; FDis) to assess effects of complementarity on ecosystem carbon exchange. Plant communities in warmer, drier sites characterized by tall species and high leaf N% had higher GPP and R _eco compared to communities with shorter growing species with smaller leaves, high LDMC and lower N content in colder, wetter sites. This shows that a shift in plant investment strategy along climatic gradients drives ecosystem carbon exchange. Furthermore, more functionally diverse communities had lower further GPP and R _eco further highlighting the importance of dominant traits for ecosystem carbon exchange. Species richness had moderate positive effects on ecosystem carbon exchange giving limited evidence for complementarity, but it may point to the importance of subordinate species for ecosystem stability. Direct effects of climate played a larger role in regulating R _eco than GPP, where temperature enhanced R _eco more than GPP, and high amounts of precipitation promoted GPP while it tended to lower R _eco . Synthesis . Our study shows that shifts in plant functional composition along climatic gradients strongly mediate ecosystem carbon exchange. The greater importance of climate on R _eco compared to GPP has important consequences for net ecosystem exchange and potential climate feedbacks, as plant community assemblage processes will lag behind changes in temperature and precipitation with climate change.

Aims: Rising ambient air temperatures may have adverse effects on alpine plant communities. To avoid extinction and to mitigate the demographic impacts of climate warming, migration and the ability to adapt become increasingly important. Experimental studies that simulate warming help test the extent and direction of functional adaptation. We ask: (1) To what extent does experimental warming drive intraspecific trait shifts in alpine species? (2) Do these trait responses vary across a precipitation gradient? (3) Do responses vary between forbs and graminoids? Location: Alpine grasslands along a precipitation gradient in south‐western Norway. Methods: At three alpine sites spanning 1315–3601 mm of annual precipitation, we measured 10 plant functional traits across 17 species of graminoids, perennial forbs and dwarf shrubs. We compared the traits of plants in open‐top warming chambers with those under ambient temperature conditions. Effect sizes were estimated using Cohen's d and analysed with respect to precipitation regimes and growth form. Results: Plant height generally increased in response to warming across all sites for both growth forms. For other traits, warming effects were context‐dependent and varied among species. At the medium precipitation site, plants showed shifts toward more conservative resource‐use strategies in response to warming, characterised by increased leaf area and leaf dry matter content, along with reduced species leaf area and leaf nitrogen concentration. The enrichment in heavier nitrogen and carbon isotopes with warming is consistent with the expectation that warming selects for individuals with high water‐use efficiency. Forbs generally exhibited stronger but more variable responses to warming than graminoids. Conclusion: Warming induces trait shifts in alpine species, but responses depend on local conditions and growth form. Predicting alpine community responses to climate change requires trait‐based approaches and research designs that allow assessing and exploring patterns in both taxonomic and environmental context dependencies.

Following rapid climate change, tundra plant communities are experiencing extensive compositional shifts. A conservation concern is the potential encroachment of boreal species into the tundra (‘borealisation’). Tundra borealisation has been sporadically reported, but not systematically quantified. Here, we synthesised data from across 32 study areas, spanning 1137 plots and 287 vascular plant species, resurveyed between 1981 and 2023. We (i) quantified tundra borealisation as the colonisation and increase in abundance of Boreal and Boreal‐Tundra species, (ii) assessed biogeographical, climatic and local borealisation drivers and (iii) identified species contributing to borealisation and their associated traits. Half of the plots experienced borealisation, although borealisation rates were not different to random expectation. Borealisation was greater in Eurasia, closer to the treeline, at higher elevations, in warmer and wetter regions, where climate change was limited, and where initial boreal abundance was lower. Boreal coloniser species were generally short‐statured, and more often shrubs and graminoids. Boreal species colonised around three times less frequently than Boreal‐Tundra species. Hence, our findings indicate that tundra borealisation is mainly driven by the spread of already established boreal‐low Arctic tundra species. These plant community composition changes could have cascading impacts on land‐atmosphere interactions, trophic dynamics and Indigenous and local livelihoods.

Plant functional trait-based approaches are powerful tools to assess the consequences of global environmental changes for plant ecophysiology, population and community ecology, ecosystem functioning, and landscape ecology. Here, we present data capturing these ecological dimensions from grazing, nitrogen addition, and warming experiments conducted along a 821 m a.s.l. elevation gradient and from a climate warming experiment conducted across a 3,200 mm precipitation gradient in boreal and alpine grasslands in Vestland County, western Norway. From these systems we collected 28,762 plant and leaf functional trait measurements from 76 vascular plant species, 88 leaf assimilation-temperature responses, 577 leaf handheld hyperspectral readings, 2.26 billion leaf temperature measurements, 3,696 ecosystem CO₂ flux measurements, and 10.69 ha of multispectral (10-band) and RGB cm-resolution imagery from 4,648 individual images obtained from airborne sensors. These data augment existing longer-term data on local climate, soils, plant populations, plant community composition, and ecosystem functioning from within the same experiments and study systems and from similar systems in other mountain regions globally.

The ecological and evolutionary consequences of ploidy-driven trait variation, particularly for autopolyploids, remain poorly understood. Saxifraga oppositifolia L. (purple saxifrage) is a highly successful arctic-alpine plant species with significant genetic and phenotypic variation potentially related to autopolyploidy. Over the past decade, we have accumulated knowledge of S. oppositifolia through student projects at the University Centre in Svalbard. Building on this knowledge, we initiated the long-term “SO-field study” in 2018 including 768 permanently tagged plants screened for ploidy level, trait variation and environmental associations. Here we summarize main findings from unpublished student projects, consolidating and extending these findings with the available data from the ongoing SO-field study, containing 63% diploids, 16% triploids, and 21% tetraploids. Our results support that Svalbard is a mixed-ploidy contact zone, where ploidy is strongly associated with certain traits, including growth form, leaf mass area, flower investment, seed production and habitat. Autopolyploidy has significantly influenced both ecology and evolution of S. oppositifolia and needs to be accounted for when autopolyploids are used as a study species or evaluated for management purposes. Our findings suggest considerable re-interpretation of former research and pave the way for new inquiries and hypotheses to be tested within this framework.

Plant–plant interactions regulate plant community structure and function. Shifts in these interactions due to global climate change, mediated through disproportional increases of certain species or functional groups, may strongly affect plant community properties. Still, we lack knowledge of community‐level effects of climate‐driven changes in biotic interactions. We examined plant community interactions by experimentally removing a dominant functional group, graminoids, in semi‐natural grasslands in Southern Norway. To test whether the effect of graminoid removal varied with climate, the experiment was replicated across broad‐scale temperature and precipitation gradients. To quantify community‐level interactions across sites, we tested for changes in the remaining vascular community (i.e. forbs) cover, richness, evenness, and functional traits reflecting leaf‐economic investment and plant size over five years. The effect of graminoid removal on forb community structure and functioning varied over time, and along the climate gradients. Forb cover increased in response to graminoid removal, especially at warmer sites. Species richness increased following removal irrespective of climate, whilst evenness increased under warmer and wetter conditions irrespective of removal. No climate or removal effect was found for species turnover. Functional trait responses varied along the precipitation gradient – compared to controls, forb mean SLA decreased in drier conditions after graminoid removal. Leaf thickness increased under cooler and drier conditions irrespective of removal. These community structure alterations demonstrate stronger competitive interactions between forbs and graminoids under warmer conditions, whilst functional trait responses indicate a facilitative effect of graminoids under drier conditions. This indicates that both competition and facilitation regulate plant communities, suggesting complexity when scaling from populations to communities. Finally, both temperature and precipitation determine the direction and intensity of biotic interactions, with ecosystem‐wide implications for forb persistence and ecosystem functioning under future climates. Further work is needed to generalise the role of changing interactions in mediating community responses to climate change.

Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems are large reservoirs of organic carbon^1,2. Climate warming may stimulate ecosystem respiration and release carbon into the atmosphere^3,4. The magnitude and persistency of this stimulation and the environmental mechanisms that drive its variation remain uncertain^5–7. This hampers the accuracy of global land carbon–climate feedback projections^7,8. Here we synthesize 136 datasets from 56 open-top chamber in situ warming experiments located at 28 arctic and alpine tundra sites which have been running for less than 1 year up to 25 years. We show that a mean rise of 1.4 °C [confidence interval (CI) 0.9–2.0 °C] in air and 0.4 °C [CI 0.2–0.7 °C] in soil temperature results in an increase in growing season ecosystem respiration by 30% [CI 22–38%] (n = 136). Our findings indicate that the stimulation of ecosystem respiration was due to increases in both plant-related and microbial respiration (n = 9) and continued for at least 25 years (n = 136). The magnitude of the warming effects on respiration was driven by variation in warming-induced changes in local soil conditions, that is, changes in total nitrogen concentration and pH and by context-dependent spatial variation in these conditions, in particular total nitrogen concentration and the carbon:nitrogen ratio. Tundra sites with stronger nitrogen limitations and sites in which warming had stimulated plant and microbial nutrient turnover seemed particularly sensitive in their respiration response to warming. The results highlight the importance of local soil conditions and warming-induced changes therein for future climatic impacts on respiration.

Alpine grassland vegetation supports globally important biodiversity and ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by climate warming and other environmental changes. Trait-based approaches can support understanding of vegetation responses to global change drivers and consequences for ecosystem functioning. In six sites along a 1314 m elevational gradient in Puna grasslands in the Peruvian Andes, we collected datasets on vascular plant composition, plant functional traits, biomass, ecosystem fluxes, and climate data over three years. The data were collected in the wet and dry season and from plots with different fire histories. We selected traits associated with plant resource use, growth, and life history strategies (leaf area, leaf dry/wet mass, leaf thickness, specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, leaf C, N, P content, C and N isotopes). The trait dataset contains 3,665 plant records from 145 taxa, 54,036 trait measurements (increasing the trait data coverage of the regional flora by 420%) covering 14 traits and 121 plant taxa (ca. 40% of which have no previous publicly available trait data) across 33 families.