My name is Paul Sokoloff. I'm a botanist and I work for the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
We're here in Resolute, where my colleague Dr. Troy McMullin and I have been collecting
lichens and vascular plants in the High Arctic. We're actually bouncing around quite a bit between
different communities. We started here in Resolute and tomorrow we're going to head to Eureka, which
is on the Fosheim Peninsula of Ellesmere Island. From there, we'll pop over to Expedition Fjord,
which is on Axel Heiberg Island. And then we'll end up at Lake Hazen, which is a northern research
camp on the side of this massive freshwater lake in Quttinirpaaq National Park. So while
I'm up here, I'm collecting all of the vascular plants at each of the stops that we're going to.
A vascular plant is a plant that you or I would think of as a plant. It's got roots, shoots, flowers.
If you went out and pointed at a tree, that's what a vascular plant is. Of course, there are no trees
in the Arctic because we're far above the tree line. So what I'm doing is I'm collecting these
plants, documenting where I collected them, what the environment was like, taking a lot of photos.
And then I'll press them in a plant press, which is just like sheets of cardboard bound
together with straps. Once they're dry and two-dimensional, they'll last for hundreds of years.
Each time somebody collects a plant or any kind of organism, and documents where it was collected,
when it was collected, who it was collected by, that specimen becomes a data point. That says that
this species was found growing at this place at that time. We'll take all of the plants that we're
collecting on this expedition and file them in the National Herbarium of Canada. That's essentially a
giant plant library that's housed at the Canadian Museum of Nature. All of those specimens together
form this baseline data for where plants are in the Arctic. This is especially important
because as the Arctic is changing, we'll be using collections and the data that comes from them
to really see how is the Arctic changing and how has it changed through time.
Now we're here in the herbarium, where we store our pressed and dried plant collection. This particular
sheet here, this is called Braya humilis, subspecies ellesmerensis. And ellesmerensis is essentially
the Latin way of saying that it is only found or originally found on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut.
This particular subspecies can only really be found in the northern tip of that island. So when
we got off the plane at Lake Hazen and we saw it growing in the sand around the camp, we were super
excited, or, at least, I was really excited. So this is that particular specimen. We dug it out, we
pressed it, we flattened the plant and it is stored in these cabinets with all of our other specimens.
This other specimen here, this is a grass species, and this one is called Festuca edlundiae.
And it is actually named after Dr. Sylvia Edlund, who was one of the first women to run
High Arctic research camp on Ellesmere Island in the geological survey. In this particular
case, this was actually found by us at Eureka, a weather station on the tip of the Fosheim
Penninsula, where her camp was located. It was really interesting for us to find it because that's a bit
of a range extension. It actually hadn't been found before at this weather station that she
had travelled to so many years in the past. So to me, these are some of the cooler specimens from
that trip. These sheets are just a small sample of what we collected on this particular expedition
and a much smaller sample of what we hold here in the herbarium. If you'd like to see some of
these specimens for yourself, check out the link in this video, which links to the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility, where you can see all of our specimens and a whole lot more.