Plant communities of a tussock tundra landscape in the Brooks Range Foothills, Alaska

We present the first vegetation analysis from the Arctic Foothills of northern Alaska according to the Braun- Blanquet approach. The data are from the Imnavait Creek and Toolik Lake regions. We focus on associations of dry and mesic upland surfaces and moderate snow accumulation sites; other upland plant communities, i.e. those of blockfields, non- sorted circles, and water tracks, are briefly described. Sum- mary floristic information is presented in a synoptic table. Five associations and 15 community types are tentatively placed into seven existing syntaxonomical classes. The com- munity descriptions are arranged according to habitat: dry exposed acidic sites, moist acidic shallow snowbeds, moist non-acidic snowbeds, moist acidic uplands, and moist non- acidic uplands. Many of the communities are Beringian vicariants of associations previously described from Green- land and the European Arctic. The described communities have a widespread distribution in northern Alaska. The rela- tionship of the associations to complex environmental gradi- ents are analyzed using Detrended Correspondence Analysis. Community composition is controlled primarily by meso- topographic relationships (slope position and soil moisture), microscale disturbances, and factors related to long-term land- scape evolution.

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