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Animals across the Arctic are changing where and when they breed, migrate and forage in response to climate change, says a new study unveiling the massive scale of the change. The changes mean humans in the Arctic may have to adapt and adjust everything from hunting seasons to conservation to land use, scientists say.

“There’s changes everywhere you look — everything is changing,” said Gil Bohrer, corresponding author of the new study published online Thursday in the journal Science.

It describes the new Arctic Animal Movement Archive, which compiles data about the movements of 86 species from golden eagles to caribou to bowhead whales across the Arctic over three decades, combining the work of more than 100 universities, government agencies and conservation groups in 17 countries around the world, including more than a dozen in Canada. That allows researchers to observe changes on a scale they had never been able to before.

“When you see the big picture, it’s kind of scary that everything’s changing — so many different aspects … every component of the system is changing in a different way. We’re going towards a large imbalance, I think.”

Bigger scale than ever before

Bohrer, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Ohio State University, is an atmospheric scientist who collaborated with biologists to study golden eagles, as their movements are affected by wind conditions in the atmosphere.

The research was among hundreds of studies around the world that involve putting sensors on animals to track their movements over time. And it led him to work with a group of ecologists doing similar studies on other species across the Arctic. Together, they wondered if there was a way to combine the data to get a more holistic, bigger picture of how animals are responding to changes in the Arctic, which is warming far more quickly than the global average as a result of climate change.

“Everyone that we knew that ever tracked anything in the Arctic — we tried to approach them and ask them if they’re willing to participate,” Bohrer recalled.

The result is a database — one that is still being expanded and added to with new studies — that allows researchers to analyze things on a scale that wasn’t possible before, Bohrer said.

The paper includes some examples of how that data can be used including a study on golden eagles that combines datasets, including Bohrer’s, to span 30 years — “well beyond the academic lifetime of anyone.” It was also long enough to correlate the birds’ movements with cyclical climate patterns and show young eagles have been shifting their migration times.