Aims As the Arctic warms, evidence shows that warmer summers substantially affect ecosystem functioning, including carbon cycling. Yet, the most rapid warming occurs in winter, with more frequent mid-winter warming events raising air temperatures above 0 °C. During these warm spells, rain-on-snow events often generate extensive, long-lasting ice layers (icing) at the snow-ground interface, potentially altering tundra ecosystem...

Overharvest can severely reduce the abundance and distribution of a species and thereby impact its genetic diversity and threaten its future viability. Overharvest remains an ongoing issue for Arctic mammals, which due to climate change now also confront one of the fastest changing environments on Earth. The high‐arctic Svalbard reindeer ( Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus ), endemic to Svalbard, experienced a harvest‐induced de...

Sea ice loss may have dramatic consequences for population connectivity, extinction–colonization dynamics, and even the persistence of Arctic species subject to climate change. This is of particular concern in face of additional anthropogenic stressors, such as overexploitation. In this study, we assess the population‐genetic implications of diminishing sea ice cover in the endemic, high Arctic Svalbard reindeer ( Rangifer tar...

The ‘Moran effect’ predicts that dynamics of populations of a species are synchronized over similar distances as their environmental drivers. Strong population synchrony reduces species viability, but spatial heterogeneity in density dependence, the environment, or its ecological responses may decouple dynamics in space, preventing extinctions. How such heterogeneity buffers impacts of global change on large‐scale population d...