Encompassing over 16,000 km2 of towering mountains, lengthy fiords, lush valleys, and big ice caps, Agguttinni Territorial Park is a protected space on northern Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. This park, and all of Nunavut, is Inuit Nunangat — Inuit homeland in Canada — and the park protects websites and biodiversity stewarded by Inuit since time immemorial.
Agguttinni means “the place the prevailing wind happens” within the Inuktitut native dialect. The park contains vital fowl areas, key habitats for polar bears and caribou, and quite a few vital Inuit cultural websites. It is rather distant: no roads result in it, and entry is barely by helicopter, boat in the summertime, or snowmobile within the winter.
Throughout the improvement of the park’s administration plan, a workforce from the Canadian Museum of Nature, led by Dr. Lynn Gillespie, inventoried the park’s crops and lichens in partnership with Nunavut Parks and Particular Locations, with the assist of Polar Information Canada.
Over 5 weeks in the summertime of 2021, Dr. Gillespie’s workforce traveled throughout Agguttinni, exploring the neighborhood of 4 base camps within the park on foot and additional afield by helicopter. Throughout this huge space, they studied many alternative habitats from the inside Barnes Ice Cap to the coast of Baffin Bay.
The heads of the lengthy fiords, sheltered far inland, hosted the best plant variety within the park, together with quite a few species uncommon on Baffin Island and two species beforehand solely recognized from farther south in Canada: Lapland Diapensia (Diapensia lapponica) and Flame-tipped Lousewort (Pedicularis flammea). Conversely, the inside plateau close to the ice cap was much less numerous, however nonetheless held new information for Nunavut, akin to Powdered Matchstick Lichen (Pilophorus caerulus), Starke’s Fork Moss (Kiaeria starkei) and Sprig Moss (Aongstroemia longipes).
This intensive fieldwork resulted in over a thousand new specimens deposited on the Nationwide Herbarium of Canada on the Canadian Museum of Nature and different herbaria worldwide. These pressed and preserved crops and lichens function proof that these species had been discovered at this particular place and time and are the inspiration for our information of botanical variety within the park.
Dr. Gillespie and her workforce additionally examined over 300 current herbarium specimens from the park space, most of which had been collected in 1950, the final time botanists intensively studied this a part of Baffin Island. Combining knowledge from these previous and new specimens has resulted in an annotated guidelines of the park’s plant and lichen variety, describing the 141 vascular plant, 69 bryophyte, and 93 lichen species documented in Agguttinni, all native to the Arctic.
This guidelines, immensely helpful to park managers and botanists, is stuffed with descriptions and photographs helpful to anybody eager about Arctic botany and is out now within the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Examine Checklist. With data on which species are current, the place they’re distributed, and which of them are uncommon, it would assist the conservation and administration of the protected space.
