Although the circumpolar countries endeavor to support monitoring programs that provide good coverage of Arctic and subarctic regions, this ideal is constrained by the high costs associated with repeated sampling of a large set of lakes and rivers in areas that often are very remote. Consequently, freshwater monitoring has sparse, spatial coverage in large parts of the Arctic, with only Fennoscandia and Iceland having extensive monitoring coverage of lakes and streams Figure 6-2 Current state of monitoring for river FECs in each Arctic country State of the Arctic Freshwater Biodiversity Report - Chapter 6 - Page 94 - Figure 6-2

Boundaries of the geographic area covered by the Arctic Biodiversity Assessment. Includes sub, low and high Arctic bounbaries

Warming in the Arctic has been significantly faster than anywhere else on Earth (Ballinger et al. 2020). Trends in land surface temperature are shown on Figure 2-2. STATE OF THE ARCTIC TERRESTRIAL BIODIVERSITY REPORT - Chapter 2 - Page 23 - Figure 2.2

Trends in abundance of marine mammal Focal Ecosystem Components across each Arctic Marine Area. STATE OF THE ARCTIC MARINE BIODIVERSITY REPORT - Chapter 4 - Page 182 - Figure 4.6

There is a great variation and heterogeneity among terrestrial Arctic ecosystems. This is further described as biogeographical areas in the Annotated Checklist of the Pan-Arctic Flora (Elven et al. 2020), as vegetation zones (Walker et al. 2005, Raynolds et al 2019) or as ecoregions recognised by Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World (Olson et al. 2001). The START focuses on high and low Arctic regions consistent with the CAVM’s subzones A to E, as shown in Figure 1-2 and Figure 2-1 STATE OF THE ARCTIC TERRESTRIAL BIODIVERSITY REPORT - Chapter 2 - Page 19 - Figure 2.1

Regional divisions of the marine Arctic, as determined by the Marine Expert Monitoring Group of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Programme (CBMP). The Circumpolar Marine Biodiversity Monitoring plan identifies eight Arctic Marine Areas where a suite of common parameters, sampling approaches and indicators will be used. Regionally specific parameters may also be applied. Exact boundaries may change over time to reflect changing bio-physical conditions. <a href="http://caff.is/marine/marine-monitoring-publications/3-arctic-marine-biodiversity-monitoring-plan" target="_blank"> Published in the Arctic Marine Biodiversity Monitoring Plan, Chapter 2, page20 - released in 2011 </a>