Rescuing Valuable Arctic Vegetation Data for Biodiversity Models, Ecosystem Models and a Panarctic Vegetation Classification

133 and biodiversity. Ecosystem models and predictive models make up an important part of CBIO-NET’s activities. A wide variety of species distribution modeling tools are already available and can be applied to predict historical, present, and future vegetation and plant distributions. These data can help refine predictions of ecosystem change, such as gas exchange between tundra vegetation and the biosphere. New advances in these methods offer the possibility to incorporate information on biotic interactions (Wisz et al., 2013) and phylogeographic history (Espindola et al., 2012) to fill gaps in information about distributions over space and time. Addressing biodiversity questions in the Arctic is a challenging task, however, because the information on vegetation patterns, which is essential to quantify speciesenvironmental relationships and make ecosystem-level predictions, contains large gaps. The large body of vegetation plot data collected across the Arctic during the past century could provide a key missing link needed to derive predictive models of future distributions under different climatechange scenarios.