Vegetation Type Hierarchies and Landform Disturbance in Arctic Alaska and Alpine Colorado with Emphasis on Snowpatches

Four-level Braun-Blanquet vegetation type hierarchies of an arctic (a section of the Arctic Coastal Plain at Atkasook, Alaska) and an alpine (Indian Peaks area, Colorado Southern Rocky Mountains) area were compared through their vascular plant taxa composition. Vegetation types at all hierarchy levels were more numerous, less well defined, and less clearly distributed along the controlling environmental gradients in the Arctic than in the alpine. This greater environmental and vegetational heterogeneity and relatively poor definition of vegetation types are probably controlled by the surface disturbances of the thaw-lake cycle, rivers, cryoturbation, and wind, which cause significant horizontal movement of materials...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation, Journal Citation; Tags: Arctic Alaska, Colorado alpine, Diagnostic taxa groups, Disturbance, Heterogeneity, All tags... Landform, Snowpatches, Springer, Vegetatio, Vegetation type, Fewer tags