Greetings!

Thanks for checking out my blog. I will be updating it periodically this summer to keep friends and family informed on my life and research in Healy, AK. 

 I left my home in Gainesville, FL a little over a week ago and now find myself living in a small cabin in interior Alaska. My graduate advisor Dr. Ted Schuur has a manipulative experiment just down the road from the cabin by Eight Mile Lake. This experiment began warming small portions of the tundra in 2008 to emulate the impact climate change will have on arctic ecosystems. In the winter, soil temperatures are elevated by means of an added layer of snow insulates the ground. During the summer, small plexiglass greenhouses are used to passively warm plants.

Currently, our lab’s research focuses on the carbon balance between plants, soils, and the atmosphere. At the warming experiment a complex system of automated chambers and gas analyzers measure the rates of photosynthesis and respiration at all hours of the day. My role in this project is just beginning because this is my first field season as graduate student in the lab. Over the next few years I will be putting a lot of my energy into investigating how warming changes nitrogen cycling in tundra ecosystems. Nitrogen limits plant productivity in arctic ecosystems because low temperatures restrict decomposition (and nitrogen recycling) rates. I am excited because this opportunity combines two things I love: playing in the dirt and biogeochemistry!

Enough of the background information already, you really came here to see some cool pictures, right?

Well, here ya go. If you'd like to see larger versions of the pictures, just click on them.

These caribou were meandering by our field site last week when I headed out for my first day of field work. Did you know that there are about 4 million caribou in North America?

Denali National Park  is located about 10 miles south of Healy. On Sunday, some of my lab mates and I took a drive into the park and saw some beautiful mountains (as well as moose, caribou, and some cold tourists). 

A Goldeneye Duck we saw paddling in a half thawed pond near Teklanika River

A Willow Ptarmigan at the field site. This guy is halfway between his summer and winter plumage but still does a pretty good job of camouflaging himself!

Almost leaf out! Many of the trees here are still just waking up for the growing season. My last few summers in AK have been spent north of the treeline so I am enjoying having leaf buds overhead.

Green understory plants

The mosses are definitely more awake (and ready to reproduce) than the trees

 Symbionts! The abundance of lichen is one of my favorite things about the tundra.

Sphagnum moss

It is not quite the dog days of summer, but the sled dogs that live by our cabin are definitely in vacation mode now that all the snow has melted. 

My nook of the cabin! This is where I sit to do all my data entry, supply ordering, email writing, etc. The timestamp for this picture is around 11 pm... check out how light it still is outside!

This is a tent in the woods by our cabin that will be functioning as my lab space for the next few months. Not having running water is definitely a challenge when doing lab work, but I think I will survive. Luckily I can drive to Fairbanks every so often to make use of the Bonanza Creek LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) laboratory.

Today I went out took some frozen soil cores. Once the soil thaws I will begin separating out the live roots from dead organic matter. I plan to repeat this a a few times during the growing season to get a feel for the rooting depth of plants at our site. Understanding what belowground resources plants have access to is important when considering their growth and allocation patterns.

That is all I have for now, folks. Check back soon!