Abstract
Anticipating the environmental and societal consequences of climate-driven permafrost thaw requires knowledge of terrain and subsurface conditions, which prove challenging to obtain at spatial scales necessary for rigorous prediction and decision-making. Analysis of a systematic inventory of permafrost landforms across northwestern Canada demonstrates that landform assemblages co-develop with ecosystems, distinguishing fundamental permafrost properties across a continental-scale ecoclimatic gradient (106 km2) and among finer-scale ecological regions (103 to 104 km2). This approach quantifies variation in geological and climatic legacies and delineates the diverse consequences of thaw. Here we show that permafrost landsystems, defined by characteristic landform assemblages, express spatial variation in soil, ground ice, geochemical, and carbon characteristics, enabling these intrinsic conditions to be inferred at regional scales through integrated mapping and analyses. Permafrost landsystems also provide a conceptual framework to inform predictions of thaw-driven change, and to formulate, share, and apply permafrost knowledge across scales, disciplines, and ways of knowing.
Data availability
The permafrost landform and environmental predictor datasets analysed in this study are available at Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31095160. Additional information and Source Data files for Figures are provided with the Supplementary materials. Source data are provided with this paper.
References
Zhang, T., Heginbottom, J. A., Barry, R. G. & Brown, J. Further statistics on the distribution of permafrost and ground ice in the Northern Hemisphere1. Polar Geogr. 24, 126–131 (2000).
Smith, S. L., O’Neill, H. B., Isaksen, K., Noetzli, J. & Romanovsky, V. E. The changing thermal state of permafrost. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ. 3, 10–23 (2022).
Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). Summary for Policymakers. in The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 3–36 (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Nitze, I., Grosse, G., Jones, B. M., Romanovsky, V. E. & Boike, J. Remote sensing quantifies widespread abundance of permafrost region disturbances across the Arctic and Subarctic. Nat. Commun. 9, 5423 (2018).
Kokelj, S. V. et al. The Northwest Territories thermokarst mapping collective: a northern-driven mapping collaborative toward understanding the effects of permafrost thaw. Arct. Sci. AS-2023-0009, https://doi.org/10.1139/AS-2023-0009 (2023).
Gruber, S. et al. Considerations toward a vision and strategy for permafrost knowledge in Canada. Arct. Sci. 9, iv–viii (2023).
Burn, C. R. et al. Developments in permafrost science and engineering in response to climate warming in circumpolar and high mountain regions, 2019–2024. Permafr. Periglac. ppp.2261, https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp.2261 (2024).
Zeigler, J. A., Lantz, T. C., Newton, M., Kokelj, S. V. & Gwich’in Tribal Council - Department of Culture and Heritage. A novel approach to assess the cumulative impacts of thawing permafrost on aquatic systems using both Indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 82, 1–16 (2025).
Hjort, J. et al. Degrading permafrost puts Arctic infrastructure at risk by mid-century. Nat. Commun. 9, 5147 (2018).
O’Neill, H. B., Wolfe, S. A. & Duchesne, C. New ground ice maps for Canada using a paleogeographic modelling approach. Cryosphere 13, 753–773 (2019).
Turetsky, M. R. et al. Carbon release through abrupt permafrost thaw. Nat. Geosci. 13, 138–143 (2020).
Langer, M. et al. Thawing permafrost poses environmental threat to thousands of sites with legacy industrial contamination. Nat. Commun. 14, 1721 (2023).
Gibson, C. et al. Mapping and understanding the vulnerability of northern peatlands to permafrost thaw at scales relevant to community adaptation planning. Environ. Res. Lett. 16, 055022 (2021).
O’Neill, H. B., Smith, S. L., Burn, C. R., Duchesne, C. & Zhang, Y. Widespread permafrost degradation and thaw subsidence in Northwest Canada. JGR Earth Surf. 128, e2023JF007262 (2023).
Lewkowicz, A. G. & Way, R. G. Extremes of summer climate trigger thousands of thermokarst landslides in a High Arctic environment. Nat. Commun. 10, 1329 (2019).
Xia, Z. et al. Widespread and rapid activities of retrogressive thaw slumps on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau from 2016 to 2022. Geophys. Res. Lett. 51, e2024GL109616 (2024).
Fraser, R. H. et al. Climate sensitivity of High Arctic permafrost terrain demonstrated by widespread ice-wedge thermokarst on Banks Island. Remote Sens. 10, 954 (2018).
Marsh, P., Russell, M., Pohl, S., Haywood, H. & Onclin, C. Changes in thaw lake drainage in the Western Canadian Arctic from 1950 to 2000. Hydrol. Process. 23, 145–158 (2009).
Nitze, I., Cooley, S. W., Duguay, C. R., Jones, B. M. & Grosse, G. The catastrophic thermokarst lake drainage events of 2018 in northwestern Alaska: fast-forward into the future. Cryosphere 14, 4279–4297 (2020).
Pironkova, Z. Mapping Palsa and Peat Plateau Changes in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Canada, Using Historical Aerial Photography and High-Resolution Satellite Imagery. Can. J. Remote Sens. 43, 455–467 (2017).
Spence, C. et al. The Canadian Water Resource Vulnerability Index to Permafrost Thaw (CWRVI PT). Arct. Sci. 6, 437–462 (2020).
O’Neill, H. B., Wolfe, S. A., Duchesne, C. & Parker, R. J. H. Effect of surficial geology mapping scale on modelled ground ice in Canadian Shield terrain. Cryosphere 18, 2979–2990 (2024).
Wang, Y. et al. Significant underestimation of peatland permafrost along the Labrador Sea coastline in northern Canada. Cryosphere 17, 63–78 (2023).
Dai, C. et al. Volumetric quantifications and dynamics of areas undergoing retrogressive thaw slumping in the Northern Hemisphere. Nat. Commun. 16, 6795 (2025).
Wilson, L. Land systems. in Geomorphology 641–644 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1968). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31060-6_220.
Lacate, D. S. Guidelines for Bio-Physical Land Classification. For Classification of Forest Lands and Associated Wildlands. (1969).
Dyke, A. S. & Evans, D. J. Ice-marginal terrestrial landsystems: northern Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheet margins. in Glacial landsystems 143–165 (Routledge, 2014).
Kokelj, S. V. & Burn, C. R. Near-surface ground ice in sediments of the Mackenzie Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada. Permafr. Periglac. 16, 291–303 (2005).
Kokelj, S. V. et al. Distribution and activity of ice wedges across the forest-tundra transition, western Arctic Canada. JGR Earth Surf. 119, 2032–2047 (2014).
Kokelj, S. V., Lantz, T. C., Tunnicliffe, J., Segal, R. & Lacelle, D. Climate-driven thaw of permafrost preserved glacial landscapes, northwestern Canada. Geology 45, 371–374 (2017).
Ecosystem Classification Group. Ecological Regions of the Northwest Territories—Taiga Plains. (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, 2007).
Ecosystem Classification Group. Ecological Regions of the Northwest Territories—Taiga Shield. (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, 2008).
Ecosystem Classification Group. Ecological Regions of the Northwest Territories – Cordillera. (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, 2010).
Ecosystem Classification Group. Ecological Regions of the Northwest Territories – Southern Arctic. (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, 2012).
Ecosystem Classification Group. Ecological Regions of the Northwest Territories – Northern Arctic. (Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Government of the Northwest Territories, Yellowknife, 2013).
Weiss, N., Sniderhan, A. & Kokelj, S. V. Permafrost landform and environmental variable dataset for 7.5 x 7.5 km grid cells covering 14 Level IV Ecoregions of the Northwest Territories, Canada. Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31095160 (2026).
Young, J. M. et al. Recent intensification (2004–2020) of permafrost mass-wasting in the central Mackenzie Valley foothills is a legacy of past forest fire disturbances. Geophys. Res. Lett. 49, e2022GL100559 (2022).
Olefeldt, D. et al. Circumpolar distribution and carbon storage of thermokarst landscapes. Nat. Commun. 7, 13043 (2016).
Karjalainen, O. et al. High potential for loss of permafrost landforms in a changing climate. Environ. Res. Lett. 15, 104065 (2020).
Makopoulou, E. et al. Retrogressive thaw slump susceptibility in the northern hemisphere permafrost region. Earth Surf. Process. Land. 49, 3319–3331 (2024).
Wolfe, S. A., Morse, P. D., Kokelj, S. V. & Gaanderse, A. J. Great Slave Lowland: the legacy of glacial Lake McConnell. In Landscapes and Landforms of Western Canada (ed. Slaymaker, O.) 87–96 (Springer International Publishing, 2017).
Rampton, V. N. Quaternary Geology of the Tuktoyaktuk Coastlands, Northwest Territories. 115 (Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Ottawa, Canada, 1988).
Wolfe, S., Murton, J., Bateman, M. & Barlow, J. Oriented-lake development in the context of late Quaternary landscape evolution, McKinley Bay Coastal Plain, western Arctic Canada. Quat. Sci. Rev. 242, 106414 (2020).
Kokelj, S. V. et al. Thaw-driven mass wasting couples slopes with downstream systems, and effects propagate through Arctic drainage networks. Cryosphere 15, 3059–3081 (2021).
Vandenberghe, J. & Pissart, A. Permafrost changes in Europe during the last glacial. Permafr. Periglac. 4, 121–135 (1993).
Péwé, T. L. Alpine permafrost in the contiguous United States: a review. Arct. Alp. Res. 15, 145–156 (1983).
Azócar, G. F. & Brenning, A. Hydrological and geomorphological significance of rock glaciers in the dry Andes, Chile (27°–33°S). Permafr. Periglac. 21, 42–53 (2010).
Boeckli, L., Brenning, A., Gruber, S. & Noetzli, J. A statistical approach to modelling permafrost distribution in the European Alps or similar mountain ranges. Cryosphere 6, 125–140 (2012).
Rudy, A. C. A., Lamoureux, S. F., Treitz, P. & Van Ewijk, K. Y. Transferability of regional permafrost disturbance susceptibility modelling using generalized linear and generalized additive models. Geomorphology 264, 95–108 (2016).
Shur, Y. L. & Jorgenson, M. T. Patterns of permafrost formation and degradation in relation to climate and ecosystems. Permafr. Periglac. 18, 7–19 (2007).
Zoltai, S. Cyclic development of permafrost in the peatlands of northwestern Alberta, Canada. Arct. Alp. Res. 25, 240–246 (1993).
MacKay, J. R. Thermally induced movements in ice-wedge polygons, western arctic coast: a long-term study. gpq. 54, 41–68 (2000).
Kanevskiy, M. et al. Degradation and stabilization of ice wedges: Implications for assessing risk of thermokarst in northern Alaska. Geomorphology 297, 20–42 (2017).
Hjort, J., Luoto, M. & Seppälä, M. Landscape scale determinants of periglacial features in subarctic Finland: a grid-based modelling approach. Permafr. Periglac. 18, 115–127 (2007).
Cao, B., Quan, X., Brown, N., Stewart-Jones, E. & Gruber, S. GlobSim (v1.0): deriving meteorological time series for point locations from multiple global reanalyses. Geosci. Model Dev. 12, 4661–4679 (2019).
Melton, J. R., Verseghy, D. L., Sospedra-Alfonso, R. & Gruber, S. Improving permafrost physics in the coupled Canadian Land Surface Scheme (v.3.6.2) and Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (v.2.1) (CLASS-CTEM). Geosci. Model Dev. 12, 4443–4467 (2019).
Cai, L., Lee, H., Aas, K. S. & Westermann, S. Projecting circum-Arctic excess-ground-ice melt with a sub-grid representation in the Community Land Model. Cryosphere 14, 4611–4626 (2020).
Westermann, S. et al. The CryoGrid community model (version 1.0) – a multi-physics toolbox for climate-driven simulations in the terrestrial cryosphere. Geosci. Model Dev. 16, 2607–2647 (2023).
Slaymaker, O. & Kovanen, D. J. Long-term geomorphic history of Western Canada. in Landscapes and Landforms of Western Canada (ed. Slaymaker, O.) 3–26 (Springer International Publishing, 2017).
Obu, J., Westermann, S., Kääb, A. & Bartsch, A. Ground temperature map, 2000-2016, Northern Hemisphere Permafrost. 40 data points PANGAEA. https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.888600 (2018).
R. Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2025).
Oksanen, J. et al. Vegan: Community Ecology Package. (2024).
Kindt, R. & Coe, R. Tree Diversity Analysis. A Manual and Software for Common Statistical Methods for Ecological and Biodiversity Studies. (World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), 2005).
Kolde, R. Pheatmap: Pretty Heatmaps. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.pheatmap. (2025).
Adobe Illustrator. Version 27.0.2. (Adobe Systems, 2023)
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the NWT Cumulative Impact Monitoring Program (S.V.K.: 164), the Climate Change Action Plan Implementation of the Government of Northwest Territories, the Climate Change Geoscience Program (Geological Survey of Canada), the Polar Continental Shelf Project of Natural Resources Canada (S.V.K.: 303-25, 309-24, 317-23, 321-22, 303-21; D.F.: 630-22, 681-23, 669-24, 665-25), and Polar Knowledge Canada and the Climate Change Preparedness in the North Program of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. University partners were supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada – PermafrostNET (S.G.: NETGP 523228-18), Canada Research Chairs (J.L.B.: 2021-00034; S.E.T.: 2023-00288), and Discovery Grants (J.L.B., D.F., T.C.L., and S.E.T.), and Global Water Futures (Canada First Research Excellence Fund). Northwest Territories Geological Survey contribution 0172. Access to Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, K’asho Got’ine, and Yellowknives Dene lands is gratefully acknowledged. Constructive comments from Yifeng Wang, Michel Allard, David K. Swanson, and an anonymous reviewer improved the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
S.V.K. worked with S.A.W., D.F., T.C.L., J.L.B., S.G., S.E.T., P.D.M., H.B.O., J.V.S., N.W., N.J.S., and A.A. to develop the concepts presented in this paper. Permafrost landform data were generated through the Northwest Territories Thermokarst Mapping Collective doi.org/10.1139/as-2023-0009. N.W. and A.S. performed the statistical analyses with guidance from J.L.B., T.C.L., S.G., S.E.T., and S.V.K. N.W., with support from N.J.S., J.V.S., and S.V.K., designed and produced figures with input from all authors. SVK wrote the manuscript with guidance and editorial input from all authors.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Communications thanks Michel Allard, David Swanson, and the other, anonymous, reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Source data
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Kokelj, S.V., Wolfe, S.A., Weiss, N. et al. Permafrost landsystems define regional variability in climate change effects on northern environments. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71216-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71216-2
