The Toolik Lake vegetation area is located near the western boundary of the Upper Kuparuk River region and encloses a 20-km^2 area surrounding Toolik Lake that stretches from the Dalton Highway on the east to Jade Mountain on the west. It includes the Toolik Field Station, the old Toolik Lake pipeline construction camp gravel pad and airstrip on the northeast side of the lake and the primary terrestrial research areas on the south, west and east sides of the lake, as well as several smaller research lakes in the immediate vicinity of Toolik Lake. The area contains surfaces with irregular topography that were glaciated during the Late Pleistocene.
The vegetation map portrays the physiognomy of the dominant plant communities in each mapped polygon. Fifty-one landcover types were recognized in the field (minimum mapping unit approximately 250 m^2). These were later grouped into the 14 physiognomic vegetation units on the map, which correspond to the same units on the 1:63,360-scale map of the upper Kuparuk River region (Walker & Maier 2008).
This geobotanical map is a vector map (shp) with fields for glacial geology, percent water, soil carbon, surficial geology, surficial geomorphology, percent water, and vegetation.
Go to Website Link :: Toolik Arctic Geobotanical Atlas below for details on legend units, photos of map units and plant species, glossary, bibliography and links to ground data.
Map Themes: Glacial geology, Percent Water, Soil carbon, Surficial geology, Surficial Geomorphology, Vegetation
References
Walker, D. A. and H. A. Maier 2008. Vegetation in the vicinity of the Toolik Field Station, Alaska. Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Biological Papers of the University of Alaska #28.
