Arctic Plants, Mosses, and Lichens from the 2023 Sampling Season

This summer I worked for the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) continuing a vegetation survey established in 1990. The plots we visited were last sampled in 2018, slated to be re-sampled in five more years or so--as part of an ongoing study of arctic plants and climate change. What's happening up there? Shrubification, in large part. The woody shrubs--Betula nana/glandulosa, Salix spp., Ledum decumbens, Kalmia procumbens, among others--are growing taller.

I didn't observe these changes personally, it was my first time in the arctic during the summer--but I did pick up on the ways parts of the low arctic tundra ecosystems look sort of like parts of our alpine meadows in Montana.

This is a list of everything I put on iNaturalist this season. Somehow, even constant plant photography doesn't seem to sum up the diversity I encountered, and I see a lot of things notably absent from this list and only wish I had taken even more photos.

My favorite find of the season was actually a very regular plant, Erigeron acris, growing in an unusual location--a roadside colony near the Toolik Lake Field Station. The plant was not recorded in early botanical accounts of the Arctic (of course that does not mean it wasn't there) but in the last 6 years it has been seen in two locations. If E. acris actually did not occur in Arctic Alaska north of the Brooks, then it has spread north on at least two occasions, once to Toolik and another to an airfield in Umiat.

Posted on August 15, 2023 03:04 PM by bristlecone