Toolik researchers study how warming reshapes Alaska's tundra plants

How cold and snow shape the Arctic’s small plant life

Toolik Lake sits in a vast, sparsely populated stretch of Alaska north of the Brooks Range, where the tundra runs to the Arctic Ocean. The vegetation rarely exceeds 10 inches (25 centimeters), a sort of dollhouse of Earth’s miniatures.

In August, researchers from Florida Atlantic University — plant biology student Adam Bloom and professor Jake Francis — walked the spongy soil, weeks after it had been frozen solid. They passed knee-high dwarf birch trees and showy rhododendrons that didn’t reach the backs of their shoes.

“The tundra’s kind of like the jungle,” Bloom said. Except this lush Arctic jungle tops out at about 10 inches.

The North Slope is the vast, sparsely populated treeless area stretching from the Brooks mountain range to the Arctic Ocean. For centuries, the Arctic cold has kept plant life small.

The extreme environment has long given researchers a unique perspective on what makes plants grow, insight that would be hard to obtain elsewhere. Now the warming climate offers one of the world’s most useful windows on how climate change affects plant life, with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the Earth, especially in the winter.

At the Toolik Field Station, roughly 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle, researchers are studying whether plants facing these harsh conditions evolve to compete or cooperate with one another.

Plant ecologist Anne Bjorkman of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said studies show that the colder and further north in the Arctic, the smaller the plant life. “Anything that protrudes above the shallow, insulating snow cover is more prone to being damaged by the cold and wind or eaten by wildlife,” Bjorkman said.

Permafrost compounds the constraint, she said: the frozen permafrost doesn’t allow roots to grow too deep.

The combination of snow, wind and permafrost has long shaped the tundra’s miniature plant life. Researchers at Toolik are now examining how those constraints — and the plants shaped by them — respond as the Arctic continues to warm four times faster than the rest of the Earth.