Denali National Park & PreservePage 104 of 192
A quilt of 13,600 squares maps Denali’s 23 kinds of land cover
Forty volunteers spent 1,100 hours over four years turning a satellite image of Denali National Park and Preserve into a quilt of 13,600 cotton squares. It hangs in the park’s Murie Science and Learning Center. The park’s six million acres are divided into 23 land cover types, each represented by a designated color and border square around the edge of the quilt, and the quilt tells of changing vegetation, receding glaciers, wildfires and shifting habitats.
NPS photo.
The quilt shows the park at the moment the satellite image was taken. An updated image would look very different, and the park asks what a similar quilt might look like in 50 years, or 100.
A tour of the land cover types
| Type | What the park says about it |
|---|---|
| Spruce forests | White and black spruce dominate, in dense forest where trees can top 20 meters and in open forest where they usually reach only about 7.5 meters. Fire sweeps open stands often, and heat helps release seeds from black spruce’s semi-serotinous cones. Stunted spruce forest has cold, poorly drained soil with abundant permafrost |
| Aspen and broadleaf forests | Paper birch and quaking aspen outnumber spruce, though only about 1.6% of the park is classed as broadleaf, mostly on floodplains. Most common south of the Alaska Range |
| Tall shrubs | Alders, which make up over three quarters of the plants here, team up with soil bacteria to take nitrogen from the ground, so they can grow in less fertile spots on steep glacial slopes. Six willow species dominate other stands, near mid-elevation streams |
| Low shrubs | Mostly American dwarf birch, between the boreal forest and the alpine zone, with shrubs about 20 to 150 cm tall; tussocks in sedge areas show wetter soil. White-crowned sparrows are common |
| Dwarf shrubs | Shrubs under 20 cm tall cover mountain slopes and high valley floors, with about a quarter of the ground bare rock; dwarf shrub rock is the highest in elevation, where Dall sheep feed on mountain avens |
| Wetland plants | Moist meadows of flowering herbs, and standing water with cotton grass, horsetail and water lilies. Aquatic herbaceous habitat is the least common type, in less than 0.01% of the park |
| Rock and ice | Nearly 10% of the park is bare ground, where lichens, a partnership of algae and fungi, dominate. Snow and ice is the least habitable type, reaches up to 6,188 meters, and covers 15.5% of the park |
| Peatlands and burns | Peatlands are nutrient-rich fens or nutrient-poor bogs in lowland former lake basins. Burn areas are mostly in the spruce-dominated northwest, and fire can help black and white spruce by clearing the understory so seeds reach fertile ground |
| Water | Silty water, heavy in glacial sediment, is found in parts of Lake Minchumina and in braided floodplains; clear water, with little or none, makes up most lakes and ponds, around 1% of the park |
A few details
Mountain avens, which look like flowering herbs but are small woody shrubs, can live up to 100 years in a good habitat, turn their flowers to follow the sun across the day, and have left fossils that paleoecologists use to follow past climate shifts. Bearflower, also called Richardson’s brookfoam, is the only plant in the park with its mix of a straight spike of white-pink flowers and waxy, kidney-shaped leaves, and grizzly bears frequent the dwarf-shrub areas where it grows. Most of the park’s aquatic habitat is unsuitable for fish because of the glacial silt in the water, though Wonder Lake has them.
The article, part of the Alaska Park Science series, asks readers questions as it goes, such as which habitat near the park entrance would count as wetland, or where the water of a clear lake comes from.
Sources
- National Park Service, Denali National Park and Preserve, “Interpreting Denali’s Landcover Types with Fabric” (https://www.nps.gov/articles/aps-v6-i2-c10.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words.