Diatoms from the Beaufort Sea coast, southern Arctic Ocean (Canada)

Interest in the interpretation of paleoenvironments has increased sharply in recent years with the growing importance of studies of the climate of the past. Whereever possible, researchers are attempting to interpret paleoenvironments by comparing ancient microfossil assemblages with modern populations. The Beaufort Sea coast (Canada: Yukon, NWT coast) is an area of particular interest to studies of coastal paleoenvironments as the area is especially sensitive to short and long term environmental changes. The authors have sampled and studied surface sediments and their diatom assemblages in an effort to establish the characteristics of modern environments as references/analogues to paleoenvironments for future stratigraphic studies. The sampled environments are believed to represent the full range of sedimentary facies that may have been preserved in the Holocene stratigraphic record of the Beaufort shelf. The sampled enviroments include the coastal freswater area, backbarrier region, the shoreface, inner shelf and the MacKenzie Delta front area. Diatom assemblages with 225 taxa representing 60 genera are presented and the paleolecological implications of their distribution are discussed. A taxonomic overview and a short description of the distribution for each taxon are also included. A CD-ROM (Win95/NT, MACOS 7.1) is included to interactively present the complex environmental data and the distributional patterns of individual diatom taxa.