My name is Paul Sokoloff. I'm a botanist with the Canadian Museum
of Nature and right now we are in the middle of a large grove of white spruce,
along the Coppermine River in Northwestern Nunavut.
I'm part of a team of three botanists from the Museum of Nature, currently on a
month-long expedition to collect all the plants in this part
of Nunavut, along the Coppermine River from the tree
line north to the coast. Along the Coppermine River, there have
been some collections made. Some collections, a few collections, a
handful of collections were made a hundred years ago as part of the
Canadian Arctic Expedition along this river valley, except that team
was here in February. So they only collected a few twigs of,
you know, sticking up above the deep snow banks. Aside from that
there's been scattered collections but very little. There's been no
comprehensive documentation of the diversity
in this really rich transition zone where the the forest, basically the tree
line, the forest tundra extends much further
north than it does anywhere else in Nunavut.
And we're finding a lot of major range extensions and things that were
unexpected, simply because the area has not been
explored. PAUL: So right now we are in a densely wooded
area. It's almost like a forest. If we went
just up the hill though it would resemble the arctic tundra a bit more.
There would be shorter plants, certainly no trees,
and it would be dominated by plants that are well adapted to the cold and
the wind found in this part of the Arctic. JEFF: So the tree line extends
northwards up the Coppermine to about, a little further north than here and
right now we're along a creek and you can see these large
spruce trees, probably 30 to 40 feet tall. What we're finding is a lot more
southern boreal species at the northern limit in this area
and some northern arctic species at their southern limit in this area.
The diversity is quite high when we're poking around in different places and
habitats and finding some interesting things. Lots of
major range extensions for species that have not been collected
in this area before. One of those examples was an Arctic
onion which we found quite a few plants of
actually, at our last camp and it's not known to occur in the Arctic. It's
known in the boreal but not up here. So that that was quite interesting. That
was a good surprise. JEFF: So one taxon that we found is Rubus arcticus.
It's an Arctic species of raspberry, a little tiny herbaceous shrub
about five ten centimeters tall. It's got a bright pink, really fragrant flower
and it is living as an understory species, which is how it survives in this
forest. And this hasn't been collected
anywhere near the Arctic. So this is, we think, a major range
extension. PAUL: I think most interestingly, we have found Balsam
poplar which is a tree that you know from down south,
but we found it actually growing just not even 100 meters away from our camp.
And this is particularly interesting because this is one of the few species
that has been found to have been moving north over time. JEFF: The process that we
use to collect plants and document plant biodiversity on a trip like this
is to first get out here in the field. So we're in a remote area.
We're about 40 kilometers south of the community of Kugluktuk, which is right on
the arctic coast in Western Nunavut. And for the first week
or so we spent, we just explored the area around our
camp up on the slope behind me. We explored in detail, this community and
here along the river. We've hiked up the creek several kilometers. We've
hiked over land. PAUL: Essentially we're trying to seek out
different habitats that plants might be found in,
different species. We're really attempting to find
all the different species that are located in this area.
So we go to those places. We collect the plants and then we bring them back to
our camp, where we begin to press the plants.
JEFF: Basically plants are put between sheets of newsprint.
Every collection gets a unique collection number and the specimens are
then flattened in a plant press, basically between cardboard. We get a
stack about this high and we then strap it together, apply
pressure so it flattens those plants, put it out in the wind and the sun, if
the sun's showing itself and after a few days the plants dry. And once
they're dried and taken care of they'll last for
centuries. And so we'll take all the specimens back to the Canadian Museum of
Nature in Ottawa. And in the museum is the National
Herbarium of Canada. The herbarium is basically a library
of dried plants. We've got the best collection of Canadian Arctic plant
specimens in the world and of course we're trying to build that and document
plant diversity in areas that have not been really properly collected. So we're
going to set up camp in Bloody Falls
Territorial Park and document all the species that occur in that park.
This information will be of use to our work but also of use
to the park biologists who at present don't have a comprehensive
inventory of what the plant diversity is. PAUL: So after we've moved on to
Bloody Falls and after we've collected everything
that there is to be found in the park, we'll be moving further north into the
community of Kugluktuk. While we're there we'll also attempt to
collect all the plants known in the community.
But we'll also be doing a community presentation and
be interacting with the people who live in the community. So
fascinating that you might find... we found willows and there
are some well-known tall stands of willows,
both along the mainland and even near Ulukhaktok on Victoria Island.
But to find tall Balsam poplar was really quite
fascinating. JEFF: But if you have the males separate from the females, there's
more chance that there'll be some genetic intermixing
among individuals which is good.
PAUL: Certainly any time you're doing field work in remote locations there are going
to be challenges. One that you might see right now are the
bugs and there are a lot of mosquitoes in this part of the Arctic.
We're away for a month, pretty much unsupported, for the whole time
so in addition to the scientific work we're doing,
the basics of day-to-day living, they keep you busy.
Something as simple as making your morning coffee is actually a bit of a
ritual that takes some practice. ROGER: So I spent a lot of time thinking about
camp life because one of my roles as part of this
team is to handle the food, so keep people fed,
which is a really important task because we're burning a lot of calories.
We're hiking a lot and we work up big appetites and so
I like to make sure that everyone is interested in the food that they're
eating and that they have something to look
forward to at the end of the day. So I make a five-day meal schedule for the
dinners, which then rotates every five days,
which seems to be enough variety to keep people interested. PAUL: So
as you can imagine bathing in the Arctic is not necessarily something we do
every day. We don't bring a shower with us in our camps.
So we use streams and lakes and they are
cold, but nothing repels the mosquitoes better than
cooling your body temperature down by plunging into an icy river.
ROGER: Camp life is very simple life. It just really cuts it down to basics. It's all
about keeping yourself fed, keeping yourself warm, keeping yourself
sheltered and getting the work done and I really appreciate that kind of
simple living. So apart from the plants, a lot of what we
see in terms of wilderness or wildlife or nature out here is actually
bird species. Mammals, we've seen a few but they tend to be pretty elusive so
we've seen caribou, quite close up. We saw muskox
around camp. We've caught a glimpse of a fox and
a wolf. So I always have a pair of binoculars at
the ready so that we can take a look at these
different things that are out there. JEFF: This is the process
by which our knowledge of biodiversity is developed, you know, people go into the
field and bring back collections and over time we can figure out, build up a
distributional record. The temperature in this part of the
Arctic raises in the next 50 to 100 years, one degree or two degrees
or three degrees, which is a major change in terms of
how plant communities sort themselves ecologically.
There could be some some major changes in the plant communities through time. We
don't know what's going to happen but by having a fairly good
understanding of the species diversity that's in the general
area now, we'll have at least some sort of baseline
that we can use to compare changes in floristic diversity.