Corresponding author: Émilie Desjardins ( emilie.desjardins@uqar.ca ) Academic editor: Adriano Stinca © Émilie Desjardins, Sandra Lai, Serge Payette, Martin Dubé, Paul C. Sokoloff, Annie St-Louis, Marie-Pier Poulin, Jade Legros, Luc Sirois, François Vézina, Andrew Tam, Dominique Berteaux. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. Citation:
Desjardins É, Lai S, Payette S, Dubé M, Sokoloff PC, St-Louis A, Poulin M-P, Legros J, Sirois L, Vézina F, Tam A, Berteaux D (2021) Survey of the vascular plants of Alert (Ellesmere Island, Canada), a polar desert at the northern tip of the Americas. Check List 17(1): 181-225. https://doi.org/10.15560/17.1.181 |
Long-term monitoring is critical to guide conservation strategies and assess the impacts of climatic changes and anthropogenic activities. In High Arctic ecosystems, information on distribution and population trends of plants is dramatically lacking. During two field expeditions in 2018 and 2019, we conducted a systematic floristic survey together with opportunistic collecting in the polar desert surrounding Alert (Nunavut, Canada) to update past vascular plant inventories. We recorded 58 species, of which 54 species were recorded over the last seven decades, and four species that are additions to the local flora (Draba pauciflora R. Brown, Festuca edlundiae S.G. Aiken, Consaul, & Lefkovitch, Festuca hyperborea Holmen ex Frederiksen, and ×Pucciphippsia vacillans (T. Fries) Tzvelev). With the addition of 19 species that were previously reported but not found in our survey, we estimate the species richness in the study area at 77 species.