LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Canadian Arctic Islands: Arctic Archipelago
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Dr. Susan Aiken, a researcher with the CMN from 1984 to 2005, began working on cataloguing the plants of Canada's Arctic Islands soon after she joined the Museum. Her task was to update the Illustrated Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, by Alf Erling Porsild published by the Museum in 1957 and 1964. Aiken's use of electronic databases in the 1980s to produce a flora (publication that describes the plants of a given area) was visionary. Impressed by the progress of Australian scientists who were using databases to catalogue grasses, she began a 20-year collaboration with Dr. Mike Dallwitz. His DELTA (DEscription Language for TAxonomy) format enables the user to easily identify organisms.
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Geologically the land surface of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is young, and repeated glaciations and deglaciations have had a profound impact in shaping land-forms and determining drainage patterns (Heginbottom 1989). Over the last two million years, the North has known several ice ages. The last one, the Wisconsin, began some 25,000 years ago. During that ice age, two huge ice sheets, the Laurentide and the Cordillera, covered most of North America. These ice sheets reached a maximum thickness of four and two thousand metre, thick respectively. Some time around 18,000 years ago, as the climate warmed, these huge ice sheets began to retreat.
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In 2005, the CMN and NRC Research Press entered into an agreement to publish the Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago on CD-ROM, a convenient and necessary format in this electronic age. Users can easily click on a species, where they will find colour photos, a map, and a description of the plant. They can ... use the interactive scientific "key" to identify species.
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Arctic Archipelago