While over 99% of coastal arctic rivers drain small catchments, current future projections of land-ocean fluxes are based on data from large rivers. A new comment in Nature Communications by Nunataryuk's Jorien Vonk and Niek Speetjens encourages inclusion of and increased focus on smaller catchments to support representative assessments of arctic ecosystem change.
They base their opinion i.e. on the newly published pan-ARctic CAtchments summary DatabasE (ARCADE) of more than 40 000 catchments that drain into the Arctic Ocean and range in size from 1 to 3.1 × 106 km2.
ARCADE is the first aggregated database of pan-Arctic river catchments that also includes numerous small watersheds at a high resolution. These small catchments are experiencing the greatest climatic warming while also storing large quantities of soil carbon in landscapes that are especially prone to degradation of permafrost (i.e., ice wedge polygon terrain) and associated hydrological regime shifts.
ARCADE is a key step toward monitoring the pan-Arctic across scales and is publicly available: https://doi.org/10.34894/U9HSPV (Speetjens et al., 2022).
