A group of Canadian botanists are embarking on a month-long expedition in a remote corner of Canada's North to gathering more than 1,000 plant samples, in part to track the impacts of climate change.

The three-person team from the Canadian Museum of Nature will spend the next few weeks canoeing down the Hornaday River to Tuktut Nogait National Park near Paulatuk, N.W.T., collecting samples from more than 300 plant species along the way.

The samples will be added to an Ottawa-based national archive of dried plants, a valuable resource for botanists around the world.

"We have virtually no plants from this entire area. This is just a big gap in our collections," Lynn Gillespie, one of the research scientists from the museum, told CBC News Thursday in Inuvik, N.W.T.

Fellow researcher Jeff Saarela said the team will set up base camps along the river, documenting all the plant species that are present.

Saarela said he hopes their work will help reveal the warming Arctic climate and its effects on plant life.

"Climate change is happening, and we expect that plants are some of the first things that are going to start to move northward quite rapidly," he said. "Plants can get around very easily compared to, say, some other organisms.

"By knowing what's in a place now, by going back, say, 10 years and knowing what was there in the past, we can have at least a baseline for documenting these type of changes."

Saarela said researchers will be able to compare what they gather now with scientific data collected on trips 10 or 50 years later in the same area.

Scientists working in the Arctic would normally use helicopters to reach remote sites, but Saarela said the researchers instead chose to paddle their way forward in order to shrink their carbon footprints.

"Traveling by canoe hearkens back to the early days of plant and biodiversity exploration, I think," he added.