Spatial and Temporal Variation of the Vegetation and Its Production, Barrow, Alaska

Abstract

This chapter examines the factors which control the distribution of vegetation, growth-forms, species, broad productivity measures, seasonal patterns, and plant succession of the International Biological Programme (IBP) Tundra Biome site at Barrow, Alaska. It provides a framework against which the detailed physiological and modeling experiments of other production studies in this volume can be viewed. The pragmatic decisions of the program focused the experiments on a limited set of plant communities, growth-forms, and species. Since all vegetation and all species could not be modeled or studied to the depth desired, the project was designed to provide an ability to generalize spatially.