McCarthys Marsh Caribou Winter Range Transects: Vegetative Changes from 1997 to 2006

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began studies of the winter range of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd (WACH) in 1981. Twenty permanent vegetation transects were deployed within the Buckland River valley on the northeastern side of the Seward Peninsula. Additional sites added in 1996 and 1997 included eight located in and around the McCarthys Marsh area of the southcentral region of the Seward Peninsula (Table 1 and Figure 1). All relocatable transects (two transects deployed in 1981 were not found again) were monitored during 1981, the mid-1990s, and again in 2005 and 2006. Jandt et al. (2008) compared all paired burn and unburned transects, while Joly et al. (2007) compared the vegetative changes over the three time periods in the Buckland Valley region. This report presents the changes in vegetation within the McCarthys Marsh area between 1997 and 2006 detected using these permanent transects. Two of the eight transects had paired burned transects, and these results will be presented here to retain a central location for McCarthys Marsh data even though these data previously were reported by Jandt et al. (2008).