28,568 square kilometres, making it the tenth largest lake in the world, and it plummets to even lower depths (614 metres) than Great Bear does. Wetlands cover about 50 percent of the area west and southwest of Great Slave, a waterlogged plain of swamps, fens, and bogs – the most extensive such area in the ecozone, and a haven for waterfowl.

The major influence on the climate of the Taiga Plains is the cold Arctic air that blows in from the north. This air results in mean annual winter temperatures as low as -26°C in the north, Mackenzie Delta, and -15°C in the south, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains of northeastern British Columbia. The warmest it gets is in the Caribou Mountains, in Alberta, with a mean annual summer temperature of 14°C. In the northern parts of the ecozone, the summer mean is almost half that. Mean

annual precipitation ranges from 200 millimetres in the north to 500 millimetres in the south. Permafrost is widespread through most of the region, and snow and lake ice last for six to eight months of the year.

Approximately 22,000 people live on the Taiga Plains, about 60 percent of them aboriginal – mainly Inuvialuit and Dene peoples – whose ancestors first came to this land thousands of years ago. The main communities today include Inuvik, Fort Simpson, Hay River, Fort Smith, and Fort Nelson, all but the first originally established as trading posts in the 19th century by the Hudson’s Bay Company. While many of the region’s inhabitants still hunt, fish, and trap, oil and gas exploration and extraction are becoming of increasing importance to the economy of this northern ecozone.

There are no National Parks in the Taiga Plains