Authors
Sabrina Plante, Emilie Champagne, Pascale Ropars, Stéphane Boudreau, Esther Lévesque, Benoît Tremblay, Jean-Pierre Tremblay
Publication date
2014/5/1
Journal
Polar biology
Volume
37
Issue
5
Pages
611-619
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Description
Recent climate changes have increased the primary productivity of many Arctic and subarctic regions. Erected shrub has been shown to increase in abundance over the last decades in northern regions in response to warmer climate. At the same time, caribou herds are declining throughout the circumboreal regions. Based on observation of heavy browsing on shrubs at Deception Bay (Nunavik, Canada), we hypothesized that the densification of shrubs observed in nearby locations did not occur at our study site despite of observed warming because of a recent peak of the Rivière-aux-Feuilles caribou herd. To assess shrub cover changes, we compared a 1972 mosaic of aerial photos to a 2010 satellite image over a 5 km2 area, divided into 56 grids of 100 30 m × 30 m cells. Most cells (n = 4,502) did not show any changes in the cover of shrubs but those who did were as likely to increase as to decrease …
Total citations
2014201520162017201820192020202120222023202417516354221
Scholar articles