2013 Recap

During last summer, my faithful camera died. I can't really blame it, after all it has traversed the Brooks Range, survived countless days in a backpack with miscellaneous field equipment, and been literally frozen solid. Needless to say, I have been pretty frustrated by the lack of pictures from my 2013 field season! Luckily I managed to scrape together a few shots with the help of a few borrowed cameras and Tom Lane. Tom is a Vermont high school teacher who worked with our lab group through PolarTrec; a program that gives teachers first hand experience with climate change research that introduces teachers to field research in polar regions. Tom made a great addition to our team last summer and got a lot of good photos that he has posted through the his journal on Polartrec's website.

Here our technician John is checking out the inner workings of one of our autochamber systems that measures carbon dioxide exchange between the plants, soil, and atmosphere. Photo credit Tom Lane

In this photo John and I are walking out to the warming experiment. Since this photo was taken we have installed some more boardwalks on this path so we spent a little less time tripping over tussocks this summer! Photo credit Tom Lane

Photo credit Tom Lane

2013 was a very good year for the sedge Eriophorum vaginatum. In July the tundra was covered in these white flowers! I love the way they bobble in the wind.

The view from our driveway east towards the town of Healy, AK. The white in the foreground is from all the Eriophorum flowers.

Home sweet home! We live on a cabin on Regulus so we get to pause here and admire the view on our way to the field every morning.

This is a section of a permafrost soil core that Jack and I collected in June 2013. Check out the frozen ice lens at the end! These samples were collected for a soil incubation experiment that I now have up and running in the lab in Gainesville, Florida. Since taking this picture I can tell you a whole lot about the chemistry of this particular chunk of soil.

Jack taking notes on the permafrost cores we collecting. You can see the engine we use for drilling into the permafrost laying on the tundra in the background. The things that look like burritos next to Jack are segments of a core that have been lifted up out of the hole as we drill deeper and deeper.

This little guy showed up to help drill permafrost!

This image is from one of the instruments we use regularly: the Tetracam. It is a specialized camera with filters for near-infrared and red wavelengths of light. Signals for these wavelengths are used to calculate the normal difference vegetation index (NDVI) for our plots every week. Indices like NDVI are useful because they can be used to relate processes that we monitor in our plots (carbon dioxide exchange, plant biomass, leaf senescence) to satellite images of much larger landscapes.