Twentieth Century Warming Allowed Moose to Colonize the Alaskan Tundra
The establishment of moose in tundra regions of Alaska was the result of warmer and longer summers that increased their shrub habitat, according to a study published April 13, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Ken Tape from the University of Alaska, USA, and colleagues.
Moose, an iconic wildlife presence throughout Alaska, were actually absent from its tundra regions earlier in the 20th century. It was previously speculated that overhunting was responsible for this absence.
In the tundra landscape characterized by very short plants, moose must forage on shrubs sticking up above the snow during winter to survive. The authors of the present study therefore wanted to investigate whether a lack of available shrub vegetation was an alternative explanation for the previous absence of moose in the tundra. They used recent changes in shrub cover and relationships between shrub height and summer temperature to estimate the available moose habitat in Arctic Alaska around 1860, to compare it to that available in 2009.
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