Towards an increasingly biased view on Arctic change

The Russian invasion of Ukraine hampers the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biasing the view on Arctic change. Here we benchmark the pan-Arctic representativeness of the largest high-latitude research station network, INTERACT, with or without Russian stations. Excluding Russian stations lowers representativeness markedly, with some biases being of the same magnitude as the expected shifts caused by climate change by the end of the century. The authors investigate the impacts of excluding ecosystem data from Russian stations in the Arctic. While the current network of Arctic stations is already biased, the exclusion of Russian stations lowers representativeness and creates further biases that can rival end-of-century climate change shifts.