Abstract. Few hydrological studies have been conducted in Greenland, other than on glacial hydrology associated with the ice sheet. Understanding permafrost hydrology and hydroclimatic change and variability, however, provides key information for understanding climate change effects and feedbacks in the Arctic landscape. This paper presents a new, extensive, and detailed hydrological and meteorological open access data set, with high temporal resolution from a 1.56 km 2 permafrost catchment, with a lake underlain by a through-talik close to the ice sheet in the Kangerlussuaq region, western Greenland. The paper describes the hydrological site investigations and utilized equipment, as well as the data collection and processing. The investigations were performed between 2010 and 2013. The high spatial resolution, within the investigated area, of the data set makes it highly suitable for various detailed hydrological and ecological studies on catchment scale. The data set is available for all users via the PANGAEA database, http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.836178.

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Understanding how long-term abiotic and biotic processes are linked at a landscape level is of major interest for analyzing future impact on humans and the environment from present-day societal planning. This article uses results derived from multidisciplinary work at a coastal site in Sweden, with the aim of describing future landscape development. First, based on current and historical data, we identified climate change, shoreline displacement, and accumulation/erosion processes as the main drivers of landscape development. Second, site-specific information was combined with data from the Scandinavian region to build models that describe how the identified processes may affect the site development through time. Finally, the process models were combined to describe a whole interglacial period. With this article, we show how the landscape and ecosystem boundaries are affected by changing permafrost conditions, peat formation, sedimentation, human land use, and shoreline displacement.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-013-0407-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This is an overview of the strategy used to describe the effects of a potential release from a radioactive waste repository on human exposure and future environments. It introduces a special issue of AMBIO, in which 13 articles show ways of understanding and characterizing the future. The study relies mainly on research performed in the context of a recent safety report concerning a repository for spent nuclear fuel in Sweden (the so-called SR-Site project). The development of a good understanding of on-site processes and acquisition of site-specific data facilitated the development of new approaches for assessment of surface ecosystems. A systematic and scientifically coherent methodology utilizes the understanding of the current spatial and temporal dynamics as an analog for future conditions. We conclude that future ecosystem can be inferred from a few variables and that this multidisciplinary approach is relevant in a much wider context than radioactive waste.

The handling and safe disposal of spent fuel from nuclear power plants has been an issue since the 1950s when the first suggested method, geological storage in salt formations, was proposed in the US. Since then a number of methods have been developed for different types of bedrocks and waste types. One common need applicable to all these methods is to describe features and processes essential in repository design and demonstrations of longterm safety. So far, most methods have not described, nor emphasized, the importance of site-specific understanding of key parameters related to a specific repository design. Furthermore, the need of interdisciplinary research and the benefits gained when handling the site as a unified connected and mutually interrelated system (from bedrock to surface) have not been fully discussed. During a 30-year period, research has been performed in Sweden to demonstrate feasibility and long-term safety of underground geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel. In this paper, the overall strategy and discipline-specific modelling methods used in the site description of a final repository in Sweden are described, as exemplified by the Forsmark site. The resulting site description covers understanding of the historical evolution of the site, site data describing the current situation as well as spatially variable models needed to design the repository and evaluate long-term safety after closure. Finally, lessons learnt from this work are summarized, which are important when employing this method in the future.

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Abstract. Global warming is expected to be most pronounced in the Arctic where permafrost thaw and release of old carbon may provide an important feedback mechanism to the climate system. To better understand and predict climate effects and feedbacks on the cycling of elements within and between ecosystems in northern latitude landscapes, a thorough understanding of the processes related to transport and cycling of elements is required. A fundamental requirement to reach a better process understanding is to have access to high-quality empirical data on chemical concentrations and biotic properties for a wide range of ecosystem domains and functional units (abiotic and biotic pools). The aim of this study is therefore to make one of the most extensive field data sets from a periglacial catchment readily available that can be used both to describe present-day periglacial processes and to improve predictions of the future. Here we present the sampling and analytical methods, field and laboratory equipment and the resulting biogeochemical data from a state-of-the-art whole-ecosystem investigation of the terrestrial and aquatic parts of a lake catchment in the Kangerlussuaq region, West Greenland. This data set allows for the calculation of whole-ecosystem mass balance budgets for a long list of elements, including carbon, nutrients and major and trace metals. The data set is freely available and can be downloaded from PANGAEA:

To provide information necessary for a license application for a deep repository for spent nuclear fuel, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co. has started site investigations at two sites in Sweden. In this paper, we present a strategy to integrate site-specific ecosystem data into spatially explicit models needed for safety assessment studies and the environmental impact assessment. The site-specific description of ecosystems is developed by building discipline-specific models from primary data and by identifying interactions and stocks and flows of matter among functional units at the sites. The conceptual model is a helpful initial tool for defining properties needed to quantify system processes, which may reveal new interfaces between disciplines, providing a variety of new opportunities to enhance the understanding of the linkages between ecosystem characteristics and the functional properties of landscapes. This type of integrated ecosystem-landscape characterization model has an important role in forming the implementation of a safety assessment for a deep repository.