Fertilizing the Tundra

This article verifies what a lot of wild stand managers have known. Adding fertilizer to wild habitats, as long as 30 years, increases grasses and deciduous shrubs and decreases the number of species. In only one habitat type – moist acidic tussock tundra – did the cloudberry, Rubus chamaemorus, increase over the years and only as an understory plant beneath dwarf birch, Betula nana. The article does not address berry yield, but I suspect, it decreased. Reductions in light levels and crowding beneath the shrubs probably made it harder for pollinators to work even if the plants produced flowers.