16. December 2025
Arctic winter conditions are rapidly changing, with increasingly frequent mild weather periods where rain is followed by ground ice on the tundra. Plants become encapsulated in ice for extended...

5. December 2025
Red foxes have expanded into tundra regions of Eurasia and North America during the last century. By being opportunistic predators and fierce competitors, invading red foxes threaten arctic fox...

4. December 2025
A new study from COAT untangles what is behind the variation in chemical composition of tundra plants - a resource that varies a lot in terms of quality for reindeer. 

3. November 2025
COAT Finnmark and Birdlife Norway have had a fruitful research collaboration for several years on the factors that control the population development of the critically endangered lesser...

22. October 2025
From October 8–10, a delegation from COAT met with colleagues at the Department of Ecoscience (ECOS), Aarhus University (Campus Roskilde), to discuss opportunities for a formalized...

5. May 2025
Tundra vegetation in Svalbard is monitored by field measurements and drone and satellite-based remote sensing imagery. In this study, COAT researchers investigated how the remote-sensed vegetation...

20. March 2025
COAT contributes with one article to FRAM FORUM 2025, which was launched in March. The magazine contains knowledge and research produced by the institutions at the Fram Centre, FRAM - High North...

17. February 2025
The article Trail cameras can greatly inflate nest predation rates (Henden et al. 2024) has been transformed into an exciting podcast, AI-generated with notebookLM.

13. February 2025
It is now winter on the tundra, and it is fascinating to see how red foxes on Varanger Peninsula cope with these conditions. This winter is especially hard on foxes because the population cycle of...

22. August 2024

The COAT field season is well underway, and several fieldworks have already been completed. Here is a brief report from some of them that took place in Finnmark.

25. April 2024
A new study from COAT uncovers suitability of habitats for the three key herbivorous species in the Norwegian high Arctic Island group Svalbard: the Svalbard reindeer, the Svalbard rock ptarmigan,...

15. March 2024
COAT contributes with two articles to FRAM FORUM 2024, which was launched on 14 March. The magazine contains knowledge and research produced by the institutions at the Fram Centre, FRAM - High...

11. March 2024
COAT's leader, Professor Rolf A. Ims, talks about the lemming, its important role in the tundra ecosystem, and how it is affected by climate changes. See Opplyst about lemmings texted in...

7. November 2023
COAT is part of Nutrient Network, a worldwide network of research stations linked to grasslands. We have our "stations" on the Varanger peninsula and have contributed to a publication in...

7. November 2023
The red fox trapping season in Varanger for COAT’s arctic fox module has started again! So far we caught 2 red foxes this year, a young male and an adult female. Both were equipped with GPS...

18. October 2023
Camera traps have become a popular tool in nature science. An example of this is the novel camera trap method we have developed in COAT for monitoring of small mammals. This method provides...

4. October 2023
Geometrid moths are insects with a holometabolic life cycle. This means that the larvae, which feed on the leaves of birch trees in summer, undergo a complete metamorphosis into adult moth during...

11. September 2023
This report from this year's COAT fieldwork in Svalbard deals with our monitoring of eastern voles and arctic foxes in Svalbard, mainly in the area around Isfjorden.

25. January 2023
Small rodents are crucial to the functioning of the tundra food-web because of their spectacular population cycles which gives the predators waste amounts of food in the peak years and cause a...

20. January 2023
Why is it interesting for a researcher to dig in the snow in January? It's just snow there, isn't it? Yes, it is snow, but we want to know what type of snow, and whether there are hard...

28. November 2022
After two years of collaboration with French bio-acousticians, the Ptarmigan module is now thoroughly testing the resulting algorithms for automatic detection/classification of Willow and Rock...

21. October 2022

In the Komag River, COAT have conducted an experiment which currently tests whether the crowberry plant affects algal growth in rivers.

11. October 2022
The 6th International arctic fox conference was arranged by the Norwegian Polar Institute in Longyearbyen 26-29 August. The conference was held at the University Centre in Svalbard and had in...

13. September 2022
Long-term monitoring represents a baseline approach for climate-ecological studies. Analyses and modeling of such monitoring data provide opportunities to generate explanatory predictions, used to...

7. September 2022
This year's counting trip has been completed and many reindeer were counted on the isolated peninsulas on the west coast of Svalbard. These localities form one of the core areas for monitoring...

30. August 2022
COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT and...

26. August 2022

Despite moderate abundances of rodents (an increase phase year) 12 arctic fox litters and 76 pups have been registered on Varanger Peninsula so far this summer.

12. July 2022
COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT and...

13. June 2022
On 8th of June Eivind Kleiven has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Population cycles in small rodents seen through the lens of a wildlife camera".

8. June 2022
On the 3rd of June Pedro Da Silva Nicolau has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Boreal rodents fluctuating in space and time. Tying the observation process to the modeling of seasonal...

2. June 2022
On 24th of May Isabell Eischeid has successfully defended her PhD thesis “Tundra vegetation ecology from the sky - Aerial images and photogrammetry as tools to monitor landscape change”.

13. May 2022
Members of COAT Varanger’s ptarmigan module has recently deployed the sound stations for this year’s monitoring in the study area just above Bergebydalen in Nesseby municipality. This work started...

29. April 2022
COAT have in collaboration with Rovfuglgruppa I Vest-Finnmark, for the fourth consecutive year, checked how many gyrfalcons, golden eagles and ravens that are attempting to breed on the Varanger...

19. April 2022
We have started a large carcass-project in Svalbard and the first pictures is already collected. It will be interesting to see how the predators behave. The project is a collaboration between...

18. February 2022
You may have heard about our gps-tracking project of red foxes on Varanger Peninsula. You can now participate by exploring the latest positions on this interactive and automatically updated map.

9. February 2022
SUSTAIN was a nationally coordinated research project funded by the Research Council of Norway during 2015-2021. The project included three geographic nods (research groups): Centre for Ecological...

8. December 2021
COAT researchers monitor vegetation disturbances by biotic and abiotic factors, such as herbivory and extreme winter weather. However, these are not typical vegetation classes included in...

14. October 2021
COAT expands the vegetation monitoring at Svalbard, now including drones and high-resolution imagery. The team is learning to use advanced equipment to capture not only changes in the...

29. September 2021
COAT has modeled the population fluctuations of willow ptarmigan in Finnmark and looked at what influences changes in the population. The modeling is the result of a collaboration between COAT,...

21. September 2021
An international team led by a COAT -professor at UiT proposes a mechanism by which the large Pleistocene mammals were essential in promoting a very high floristic diversity, and that a similar...

17. September 2021
The Eastern European vole is the only alien mammal species in Svalbard and the host for a zoonotic parasite. In a new paper published in PNAS, COAT researchers analyze the vole’s population...

31. August 2021
Large-scale moth outbreaks have led to profound changes in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indirect effects on the...

16. June 2021
Long time series are important for understanding changes in nature. Despite extensive research on vegetation in Svalbard, long-term monitoring has been lacking. But we can now present “Year 1” of...

29. March 2021
Snow measurements are an important part of the monitoring done in COAT – snow is indeed an important driver of many processes underlying dynamics of arctic ecosystems. The measurements we do focus...

18. February 2021
Iterative near-term forecasting is a promising approach to better understand and manage rapidly changing ecosystems such as the Arctic. Forecasts generated on a short-term time scale allow...

11. February 2021
In the first week of February, a small team from COAT and local experts Alfred Ørjebu and John Arne Kristiansen placed 3 wooden box traps designed for live trapping red foxes in southeastern...

27. November 2020
Management of endangered species by culling mesopredators is increasingly common. To what extent such programs work as intended, is less clear. In a new study, COAT researchers evaluated the...

13. October 2020
Vegetation monitoring was carried out in late July and early August in Komagdalen and Vestre Jakobselv on the Varanger peninsula. Besides the annual monitoring in heath and meadow sites, the...

28. September 2020
The average temperature for June, July and August at Svalbard Airport was 7.2 degrees, which is 3 degrees above normal, and 0.5 degrees above the old summer record from 2015. For Svalbard Airport,...

24. September 2020
There were five dens with confirmed reproduction this summer, despite the low small rodent abundance. Three were in the eastern half of the Peninsual and two further to the west. It is likely that...