Get ready for green

This map from new research, published March 31 in Nature Climate Change, shows how vegetation is distributed and the predicted distributions for the 2050s, with purple representing shrubs and green representing tree cover.

Fans, barbecues, patio furniture: these are already on display in Iqaluit stores, in anticipation of warm weather in Nunavut’s capital.

But soon you may see lawn mowers on sale alongside those reclining sun chairs: the Arctic of 2050 will be much greener, new research suggests.

Using climate scenarios for the 2050s and models that show how climate and vegetation are connected, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation say there’s a “potential for extremely widespread redistribution of vegetation across the Arctic.”

This would result in about half of all vegetation in the Arctic region switching to a different class and a big increase in tree cover.

“Such extensive changes to Arctic vegetation will have implications for climate, wildlife and ecosystem services,” the researchers conclude.

The researchers also say that the more vegetation there is in the Arctic, the more warming will occur because more dark vegetation on the land increases the amount of heat that’s absorbed.

“Widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem,” said Richard Pearson, a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and the lead author of the study.

As for what this means for Nunavut and Nunavik, take a look at some of the maps published March 31 along with the research paper in Nature Climate Change.

You’ll see more shrubs on Victoria Island and increased tree growth across the northern part of the Kivalliq region along with more shrubs in Nunavik.

Also a March edition of Nature Climate Change, findings shared by an international team of 21 authors from seven countries that looks at satellite data from the past 30 years showed Research shows there’s already an increase in vegetation north of 60.

Their NASA-funded study found vegetation in the Arctic increasingly resembles the kind found at several degrees of latitude farther south, as recently as 30 years ago.