Being common is rather unusual. It’s far more common for a species to be rare, spending its existence in small densities throughout its range.
Being common is rather unusual. It’s far more common for a species to be rare, spending its existence in small densities throughout its range. How such rare species persist, particularly in an environment undergoing rapid climate change, inspired a 15-year study in arctic Greenland from the University of California, Davis.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that caribou and muskoxen helped mitigate the effects of climate change on rare arctic plants, lichens and mushrooms at the study site.
The authors suggest that by constraining the abundance of the two most common plant species — dwarf birch and gray willow — large herbivores may allow other, less common species to persist rather than be shaded or outcompeted for nutrients by the woody shrub’s canopy, or suppressed by leaf litter and cooler soils.
“This is more evidence that conserving large herbivores is really important to maintaining the compositional integrity of species-poor systems like the arctic tundra,” said lead author Eric Post, director of the UC Davis Polar Forum and a professor in the UC Davis Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology.
Read more at: University of California - Davis
Arctic wintergreen, a very rare species, grows among birch and willow shrubs near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. (Photo Credit: Eric Post, UC Davis)
