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Middlebury College

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Program Name

Iceland: Climate Change and The Arctic

Abstract

As glaciers retreat worldwide at an accelerating pace, understanding primary succession in these newly exposed landscapes becomes increasingly critical. This study examines the initial vegetative colonization patterns in glacial forelands, focusing on the influence of geomorphological formations of resulting plant communities. By analyzing vegetative communities in glaciofluvial and push moraine deposits, this study highlights how the more varied, channelized morphologies of fluvial deposits create potential microclimates better conducive to heterogenous plant colonization than the homogenous terrain of the nearby push moraine. Vegetative coverage, sediment size, and species abundance was collected at 480 sites across 6 different historical glacial extents across Breiðamerkurjökull’s glacial foreland, spanning 60 years of historical glacial retreat. Results show higher biodiversity, plant coverage, and variability in the fluvial sediment plots, indicative of a wider range of plot development than seen in the push moraine plots.

The findings in this paper add to the growing body of work that challenges traditional directional models of primary succession, suggesting that in this case the high topographic variability and distinct sedimentary niches in the sampled fluvial environments facilitate faster and more diverse plant establishment. The study underscores the importance of considering geomorphological features in ecological research and lays the groundwork for potential feature-scale methodology for chronosequence site selection.

Disciplines

Botany | Climate | Environmental Monitoring | Glaciology | Soil Science | Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

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