DOI: 10.21963/13298
title: Botanical Survey of Agguttinni Territorial Park, Baffin Island, Nunavut

description: Staff from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) conducted a botanical inventory of Agguttinni Territorial Park (TP) on Baffin Island between July 22 and August 22, 2021. Knowledge of the flora of east-central Baffin Island was previously limited and based primarily on work done by the Baffin Island Expedition in 1950. The scientists on that expedition collected plants and lichens from very little of the area now included in the Park. CMN’s work is the first comprehensive floristic study of Agguttinni TP. The CMN staff documented and made collections of all vascular plants encountered within the park and made preliminary collections of algae, bryophytes, and lichens. Over 1000 collections of vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes and algae were made in the Park. A set including all the collections is archived at the National Herbarium of Canada at the CMN and a second set was provided to Nunavut Parks and Special Places. The CMN staff also located 158 vascular plant, lichen, and bryophyte specimens previously made within the park. A total of 140 species (four with two subspecies each) of vascular plants representing 25 families and 65 genera were identified, including one lycopod species, two horsetail species, three fern species, and 134 flowering plant species. The largest families are Cyperaceae (22 spp.), Poaceae (20 spp.), and Caryophyllaceae (15 spp.), and the largest genus is Carex (sedges,16 spp.). Lichen collections included 60 species (one with two subspecies), and 54 bryophyte species (11 liverworts and 43 mosses) and two algae species were identified. Comprehensive species lists for all plants and lichens known from the Park are provided, as is an illustrated guide to all vascular plant species and common or interesting lichens and mosses. The vascular plant collections from Agguttinni TP include one new record for Baffin Island (Puccinellia bruggemannii) in addition to records of several species not previously reported from eastern or northeastern Baffin Island. Several species are at or near their northern limits in Canada; the collections of Carex holostoma and Diapensia lapponica are the northernmost records in Canada. New records were documented for multiple species that are rare on Baffin Island. The algae, lichens, and most of the bryophytes that were collected represent common, species widespread in the Arctic.
description: This is the specimen dataset for a botanical inventory of Agguttinni Territorial Park (TP), located east of Kanngiqtugaapik [Clyde River] on the east-central coast of Baffin Island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut. Agguttinni TP is the largest territorial park in Nunavut, covering an area of about 1,646 km2, and stretching from Baffin Bay southwest to the Barnes Ice Cap. The park includes some of the most spectacular scenery in Canada, with ice-capped mountains and very long, deep fiords, and is known as an ecotourism and rock climbing destination. Its diverse topography results in the park having large microclimatic variation, many different habitats, and a correspondingly diverse flora and vegetation. The vascular plant flora of east-central Baffin Island has been little explored or documented. Most of our knowledge of this flora comes from plant and lichen collections made during the 1950 Baffin Island Expedition, which until now was the only botanical study focused in the region. Comprehensive results of their plant research were never published, although the vascular plant collections were used in making species distribution maps for the Illustrated Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (Porsild 1957), and more recently in the updated flora for that region by Aiken et al. (2007). Surprisingly, and in contrast to elsewhere in the Arctic, the lichen flora of this area was better documented with the publication The Lichens of Baffin Island (Hale 1954) by the expedition’s lichenologist. The flora of the area included within the proposed boundary of Agguttinni TP is particularly poorly known. Given the general lack of knowledge of vascular plant diversity on east-central Baffin Island, and specifically within Agguttinni TP, we conducted a botanical survey of Agguttinni TP between July 22 and August 22, 2021. Additionally, we collected a small number of samples within the community of Clyde River.