“…In the late Tertiary and the ice ages of the Quaternary, cooling and the retreat of the forests created new habitats available for colonisation by plants, especially herbaceous lineages that were able to tolerate or adapt to the harsh environmental condition. Evidence of early arctic vegetation composition based on fossil deposits is confined to a rather limited number of taxa (e.g., Cerastium, Draba, Dryas, Ranunculus, Saxifraga, Silene, Stellaria; Bennike and Bøcher, 1990;Bennike et al, 2010;Matthews and Ovenden, 1990 arctic flora originated from different sources, including autochthonous elements of the Arcto-Tertiary vegetation that evolved in situ by adapting to the increasingly cold climate, Quaternary migrants from adjacent forests and saline coastal habitats that may have been pre-adapted to arctic conditions and migrants from more remote southern mountains (Tolmachev, 1960, for example, Salix, Carex, Potentilla, and Saxifraga).…”