How did you react on receiving this award?
With a big smile! It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to a Nobel prize.
Tell us a about your research and why you find it interesting?
The main focus of my research group is exploring how environmental change (especially climate change) impacts biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We especially focus on Arctic and alpine ecosystems since they are warming much faster than the rest of the world. I find this subject personally interesting for several reasons, but the most important is probably my love of nature in general and my appreciation for the incredible beauty of Arctic/alpine landscapes in particular. I am therefore motivated to understand why and how these regions are changing, and what the consequences of those changes could be for the rest of the planet.
Why do you believe it is important?
Biodiversity provides countless benefits to people, and yet intensive human activity is leading to dramatic changes in biodiversity. We typically don’t understand all the consequences of these changes, even though they affect us profoundly. Ultimately, our research will help policymakers, communities, and other decisions makers to understand these consequences and identify ways to prevent or mitigate them.
What impact may your research have in society in the future?
I hope my research will be useful in several ways, including contributing to better predictions and policy decisions, providing actionable knowledge for biodiversity conservation and management, and ideally also fostering improved public awareness and engagement with biodiversity and climate science.
Award motivation
Anne Bjorkman’s scientific contributions focus on understanding how human actions are reshaping Earth’s biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems. She combines large-scale data syntheses with experimental approaches to reveal both the direction of global change and the processes that drive it. Together, these efforts show how anthropogenic climate change and other human pressures are rapidly altering the composition, structure, and functioning of ecosystems across the planet.
On mountaintops across Europe, climate warming has led to a rapid influx of warm-adapted species, reshaping high-alpine biodiversity. In the oceans as well as in the tundra, the number of species in local communities has not changed on average, but turnover – i.e., the gain or loss of species from a community – accelerates under climate warming.
Such compositional change can have knock-on consequences for the rest of the ecosystem; for example, the immigration of taller plant species leads to increases in community height, which in turn alters soil temperatures and carbon cycling in the tundra. In contrast, body size has declined rapidly in marine fish communities due to targeted fishing of large individuals and species, fundamentally restructuring food webs and altering resources available to humans.
Together, these discoveries highlight the pervasiveness of human-driven change and provide a foundation for predicting future shifts in biodiversity and the services that ecosystems provide to people.
