Arctic landscapes are responding more rapidly to anthropogenic warming compared to the rest of the world. Greenland is particularly affected, as increasing mean annual temperatures have triggered intensifying positive feedbacks between ice loss, lower albedo, shrub encroachment, and increasing precipitation. Understanding how resilient Arctic organisms have been to warming in the past can help conservationists develop realistic management plans for the future, but knowledge gaps remain for many taxa. For example, the white-faced muskox (Ovibos moschatus wardi) has survived evolutionary bottlenecks during past warming events, but only because their populations decreased slowly enough to select against most deleterious genetic traits. In order to identify the tipping points for muskox survival or extirpation under warming conditions, we need to combine information on muskox presence through time with information on associated changes in the broader ecosystem. This includes the study of environmental responses to initial human contact in Greenland (ca. 4,500 years BP). To this end, I am using sedimentary ancient DNA records from five lakes distributed throughout northern Greenland to build a comprehensive understanding of how plant and animal communities have responded to environmental changes since the Late Pleistocene (ca. 13,000 years BP). I will be using shotgun metagenomic methods on at least 40 sediment intervals from each lake to study population trends not only muskoxen, but also plants, birds, and fish. This work is part of the First Contact Project, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.