Flora finders
HOW A NEW CATALOGUE OF PLANTS IS REVEALING A CHANGING NORTH
tangy mountain sorrel and succulent crowberries are just a few of the plants that burst into life during the Arctic’s short, intense summers. But scientific knowledge of northern flora and the impacts of climate change is patchy, says Arctic botanist Jeffery Saarela. He and his colleagues at the Canadian Museum of Nature are filling in some of the gaps. “Before we can know how Arctic plants are changing,” he says, “we need to know the species and their distribution.” Saarela is working with Lynn Gillespie and other museum botanists on the Arctic Flora Project, compiling a new botanical catalogue of the Canadian Arctic — the first reference ever to document the vascular plants (those with roots, leaves and stems) for the entire region. Every July since 2009, the museum team has explored the ground and made collections of all the species in regions of western Nunavut, the eastern Northwest Territories and southern Baffin Island, travelling by helicopter, canoe and foot. In 2016, the botanists worked near Arviat, Nunavut, on the west side of Hudson Bay. Specimens are placed in plant presses where the Arctic air, which contains very little moisture, quickly dries them out, after which they’re taken south to the museum for storage and laboratory analysis. They are housed permanently in the museum’s National Herbarium of Canada and other Canadian and international herbaria. The project is producing baseline information that can be used in the future to measure environmental change. “There’s good evidence to show that Arctic shrubs are already responding to warmer temperatures,” says Saarela. “Shrubs are getting much bigger and denser. This is called ‘greenification’ or ‘shrubification’ of the Arctic. But contrary to what we sometimes hear, there is little evidence that plant species are moving north because of climate change.” The project, however, is more than a tool for measuring change. “It’s basic research to understand biodiversity in our country,” explains Saarela. “That’s a key aspect, and it’s unrelated to climate change. On every trip we find surprises, such as species farther north or south than they’ve been recorded before. That changes our understanding of the ecological conditions that they can survive under. And it means there’s still work to do.” The results will be available to all, posted online with detailed descriptions, images and maps. “In the future,” says Saarela, “researchers will be able to see exactly what we’ve collected and will compare these records with what they see around them when they walk across the tundra, even a hundred or more years from now.”