The caribou populations of southwest Alaska have declined precipitously over the past decade or more, and the total population of this expansive region currently is 80% below the populations of the late 90’s to early 2000’s. This research is a collaborative effort among the principal managers of this resource to directly address the causes of this decline.The goals of this project was to mechanistically link climate, soil N cycling, plant morphological and nutritional phenology, and caribou population dynamics, by collecting high-quality information to knit together ecosystem function across several trophic levels and at a range of spatial and temporal scales.
