Aulavik National Park is one of Canada's newest national parks, and because of its recent establishment and remote location we have much to learn about the structure and function of its arctic ecosystems. Aulavik is a large and pristine national park located in the northern portion of Banks Island in Canada's Arctic Islands (see Fig. 1). A team of Inuvialuit and Parks Canada scientists carried out fieldwork during the summers of 1995 and 1996 in order to inventory the biological and archaeological resources found within the park. This report summarizes the results of this fieldwork concerning the bird populations that inhabit the park (see Henry and Mico, 1997, for details).

        Aulavik National Park contains a diversity of landscapes -- upland plateaus, unvegetated polar deserts, wetlands with frost polygon features, sheer cliffs along the coast and southeast of Mercy Bay, and a lush valley along the Thomsen River. Most of Banks Island has probably been free of glaciation for millions of years or never glaciated (Zoltai et al., 1980). All land surfaces of the park are underlain by permafrost with the thickness of the active layer during August averaging approximately 50 cm, less on peaty soils and more on well-drained soils. More than 160 species of vascular plants have been documented to occur in Aulavik National Park (Raillard, pers. comm.). The vegetation of the park is dominated by polar semi-desert and desert community types.  Local sites where soil moisture is good are vegetated by more productive graminoid shrub tundra and wet sedge meadows. Ferguson (1991) describes eight habitat types from the Muskox River valley. These eight habitat types were ground-truthed in the Muskox, Eames and Thomsen river valleys, and they were used as the core of a habitat classification system for this project.