Some Canadian botanists will be going on a month long trip in an isolated corner of the Canadian North in order to gather more than 1,000 plant samples.  The hope is that by gathering these plant samples, they will be able to track some of the impacts of climate change happening in the area.

In the next few weeks the team from the Canadian Museum of Nature will canoeing from the Hornaday River to Tuktut Nogait National Park near Paulatuk, N.W.T. in order to collect samples along the way from more than 300 different plant species. Once the samples are collected, they will be added to the valuable Ottawa-based national archive of dried plants. These samples will greatly add to the existing collections, painting a broader picture of climate change and the plant life in the Canadian Arctic region.

“We have virtually no plants from this entire area,” one of the research scientists, Lynn Gillespie said. “This is just a big gap in our collections.” Gillespie spoke to CBC News last Thursday in Inuvik, N.W.T.

Another research team member, Jeff Saarela, said that the team plans on setting up their base camps along the Hornaday River and will be documenting every plant species that is present. He also hopes that their research will be helpful in revealing the effects of the warming Arctic climate on the region’s plant life.

“Climate change is happening,” he said, “and we expect that plants are some of the first things that are going to start to move northward quite rapidly. Plants can get around very easily compared to, say, some other organisms. By knowing what’s in a place now, by going back, say, 10 years and knowing what was there in the past, we can have at least a baseline for documenting these type of changes.”