The movements of thousands of animals show how life in the Arctic has changed

"The Arctic is entering a new ecological state, with alarming consequences for humanity."

Thus begins an article published in the journal

.

The work, signed by more than a hundred scientists, uses millions of records of thousands of animals followed since the 1990s thanks to various geolocation technologies, such as GPS.

With these data, they have been able to link ongoing climate change with such a large number of biological changes that they are causing an entire shift in the Arctic ecosystem.

The Arctic Ocean and adjacent regions (from frozen lands to the boreal forest) are the areas of the planet that experience global warming the most.

Due to phenomena such as Arctic amplification, Arctic spring arrives earlier, the sea is running out of ice in summer, autumns are delayed and winter is getting milder.

So much change is impacting all of life: marine species, such as killer whales, travel further and further and further north, colder regions are no longer a safe haven for the birds that nested there or bears have been forced to exchange seals for eggs.

Now some 130 scientists have launched the Arctic Animal Movement Archive (AAMA, integrated into the Movebank platform).

This huge database, which already has 15 million records, is fed by GPS geolocation data of the movements of some 8,000 individuals of 86 species, including land, marine and bird mammals.

They have already collected 200 partial investigations, most with follow-ups dating back to the end of the last century.

Their analysis provides a global idea of ​​what is happening in the Arctic.

A new archive houses millions of records with the movements of thousands of geolocated animals of almost 90 species

"This work shows what can be learned by comparing large-scale population data," says University of Maryland biologist and study co-author Elie Gurarie in a note.

"I would say that this is a first example of what we could call the ecology of the global movement of animals," adds this quantitative ecologist.

One of the oldest studios housed in the AAMA dates back to 1993, its protagonists are a hundred golden eagles that carry a transmitter.

Every summer they fly from the forests of the US and Canada to the Arctic shores.

In those months the prey abound and take advantage to nest.

But the authors of the follow-up have verified that, while the oldest pairs continue to arrive and nest on the same dates, the youngest ones are anticipating their arrival each year.

This could give them an advantage over the older ones.

A second study has tracked more than 900 female caribou since 2000. The work shows that herds that live further north are earlier calving, something that herds in other latitudes do not.

"The ability to study biological processes, such as childbirth, at such large scales, with populations and subpopulations and in millions of square kilometers, is unprecedented and even less so in such remote and extreme environments," says Gurarie.

But the impact does not remain in one species or another.

The worst consequences would be occurring in the interaction between them.

In this new archive of animal movements there is a work that tracks three predators,

, black bears and wolves and two herbivores and potential prey, caribou and elk.

Since 1998, when they began to record their movements, they have observed that prey are increasing their mobility as the temperature rises, while their hunters are reducing it.

"The way in which animals respond to changing meteorological conditions through movement has relevant implications for competition between species and predator-prey dynamics," comments University of Washington researcher and co-author of this latest work Peter Mahoney.

For the professor of environmental engineering at the Ohio State University (USA) Gil Bohrer, this database still growing "will tell us how the behavior of animals is changing in the face of climate change."

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