Vegetation and goose nest data from Southampton Island, Nunavut

We undertook intensive ground surveys of the plant communities in a multi-species goose breeding area at East Bay and South Bay on Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada, in the summer of 2010. We chose the East Bay site because unpublished data, reports, and journals from studies in 1979 and 1980 (KFA) were available for comparison of some components of the ecosystem, providing a unique opportunity for us to describe changes in vegetation of this remote site over a 31-year period. This constitutes one of the longest histories of vegetation change available for an Arctic goose colony. We chose South Bay because a goose colony was established there after the 1979-1980 study and the site should provide a contrast to East Bay, which has been occupied by goose colonies for at least a century. We employed two different vegetation sampling schemes: nest site ground cover data, illustrating how the habitat selected by geese themselves has changed over the decades; and transect/quadrat sampling, providing an unbiased description of current conditions in nesting and foraging areas. Our data demonstrate a striking declined over the 31-year period as a result of intense foraging by increasing populations of nesting geese. Please see the cited manuscript (Abraham et al. 2020: DOI: 10.1139/AS-2018-0032) for further details and analyses.