The NSINK Initial Stage Network training network targets one of the most vital, interdisciplinary problems facing future Arctic environmental management: namely the enrichment of Arctic terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by reactive atmospheric nitrogen from low latitude emission centers. This problem will greatly exacerbate ecosystem response to climate change, and urgently requires holistic, sources to sinks type studies of nitrogen dynamics.

The delivery of nitrogen from tropospheric and even stratospheric sources will be considered using lagrangian and eulerian approaches that directly link air mass movements to the mass balance of nitrogen at the ground surface. NSINK will then track the fate of this nitrogen through the polar sunrise and into the melt period by considering atmosphere-snow-soil-organism transfers at small plot to catchment scales. Further, in order to constrain temporal change in nitrogen accumulation in this sensitive environment, research into the collection and interpretation of ice core and lake sediment archives will also be undertaken and linked to a reanalysis of atmospheric observations collected over the last 16 years at Ny-Ålesund.