Tundra Research Paper

The tundra is defined as a large, treeless, and almost flat open space. They are located at the uppermost parts of North America, Europe, and Asia, where it is near the North Pole (Morris 741). In the tundra, most of the months’ average temperature is below the freezing point. The winters are dark, long and harsh in contrast, the summers there are short and somewhat warm. There is extremely little precipitation there. In the tundra the subsoil is frozen for most of the months. The permanently frozen subsoil is called permafrost and because of the permafrost, limited variation of vegetation can grow in the summer. Some vegetation that can survive in the tundra includes sedges, mosses, lichens, perennial forbs, birches, willows, heaths, and dwarfed or low shrubs.

Some animals live and stay in the tundra while others migrate to another location. Animals that live and stay in the tundra include some birds like the ptarmigan and some mammals like the musk ox, arctic hare, and arctic fox (Woodward).It’s incredibly easy to destroy the tundra because of the lack of variations in the number of plants and animals. If something happens to the permafrost or if a species becomes extinct, the whole ecosystem may collapse. All species in the tundra are significant because the food chains there are very simple. A food chain can consist of an arctic fox eating a lemming, which devoured plants in the tundra, like mosses. The population of arctic foxes, therefore, depends on the population of lemmings and the population of lemmings depend on the amount of plants they eat there are. If the whole ecosystem collapses, some species will become extinct because the tundra has a lot of species that only can live and survive there. These species include the arctic hares, arctic ground squirrels, lemmings, arctic wolves, and arctic