Twenty year record of vegetation change from long-term plots in Alaskan tundra

We examined change in plant species composition at two sites in the Southern Alaska Foothills, on the north slope of the Brooks Range, over a 20-year period. Current models and experimental work with tundra vegetation have predicted an increase in shrub species and a decrease in graminoid species as a response to climatic warming. Furthermore, the warming of the Alaskan Arctic during the past 150 years has accelerated over the last three decades and is expected to increase vegetation productivity in tundra if shrubs become more abundant. Decadal change in vegetation in tundra landscapes may be both subtle and slow. Interpreting such change is complicated by spatial variation at small scales and by difficulty in understanding how point changes in species composition relate to landscape-level change in vegetation. Our approach involved resampling the same points in a series of permanent plots over a multi-year interval, using large sample sizes, and analyzing several aspects of compositional change. Our analysis was designed to look at changes in overall species' abundance over time and at relationships between species in terms of the likelihood of one species replacing another. Understanding relationships between species increases the predictive power of measures of species composition and abundance in a time series. We found significant increases in abundance of specific shrub and graminoid species, and a general increase in the extent of the canopy, with a concurrent decrease in the abundance of understory mosses. These changes, extrapolated over the broad expanse of similar vegetation in the Arctic, may have profound above and below ground effects including changes in soil properties, carbon storage and nutrient cycling, and plant community composition.