Arctic fox conservation in northern Norway as an example of integrating management with long-term ecological research

The arctic fox metapopulation in Fennoscandia has been critically endangered over a century, but due to thorough research and intensive conservation measures it has now started to recover. On Varanger Peninsula in northeastern Norway, research about the causes of the arctic fox decline was initiated in 2004. A conceptual model that hypothesized the irregularity of lemming cycles caused by warmer winters and high abundance of the competitively superior red fox as the two main drivers of the critical state of the local population guided the establishment of a monitoring program that included arctic and red foxes, but also other key ecosystem components. Intensive red fox culling in part of the study area was implemented as an experimental management action. This research has subsequently become a part of the Climate-ecological Observatory for Arctic Tundra (COAT), an adaptive monitoring program for long-term research on climate change impacts on terrestrial arctic ecosystems. Following the paradigm of adaptive monitoring, the results of the first 12 years of the study was evaluated in 2017 and led to the conclusion that red fox culling was not sufficient to help arctic foxes recover in the present ecosystem conditions. We hypothesized that absence of lemming peaks and an initially very small and isolated arctic fox population (i.e. demographic stochasticity) contributed to the lack of a response to the culling action. Consequently, two additional management actions decided by the Norwegian Environment Agency were implemented in collaboration with the National Program for Arctic Fox Conservation to address these hypotheses. Supplemental feeding was initiated together with the release of 65 captive bred arctic fox pups from the Norwegian Captive Breeding Program on Varanger over three years (2018-2020). These combined management actions resulted in a strong increase of the local arctic fox population. At the same time, the research conducted to evaluate these management actions has resulted in several now 20-year long time series that are integrated in the research plan of COAT. These data provide unique knowledge about this low arctic ecosystem affected by rapid climate change and increasing human activities. This study shows how on the one hand a monitoring program emerged from a management question – the conservation of arctic foxes – and on the other hand how a thoroughly designed adaptive monitoring program provides crucial information for managing endangered populations.