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!

Farewell and Thanks

Awesome river goo growing at Toolik Lake Outlet. A crew of us wandered around here and went for a swim on my last day off.

Wanna ride? This lil guy looks like he's been rusting out on the tundra for a while now.

This year the terrestrial folks at Toolik Lake performed a HUGE biomass harvest out at the Anaktuvuk River Burn. Soils, litter, organic matter, and plants were all collected in 10cm x 20cm quadrats along various transects within the footprint of the fire. Once harvested, the material in these quadrats was to be sorted into about a hundred different categories. "Plucking" apart the tundra like this requires man-power, patience and a sense of humor.

Us pluckers hard at work. Our lab looked like this for the better part of week, 12+ hours a day. Topics of conversation included moss identification, clarifying the difference between attached and unattached pre and post fire litter, research interests, musical likes and dislikes, and what substance you would most like to jump into a swimming pool of. Eventually, though, most conversations centered around one question: How the hell did we all end up here in a trailer tweezing apart moss for hours on end?
The wonderful folks around this table where what made the tedious work possible and it was a pleasure to get to know them better. The only downside of participating in this pluck is that I occasionally catch myself sorting my salad greens by species.

Before Plucking

After Plucking
The categories this bit of tundra was sorted into include Eriophorum green blades, attached post fire litter, attached pre fire litter, Eriophorum rhizomes, live green moss, and Eriophorum sheaths (listed clockwise from top-right).

Burn, baby, Burn!
Just some of the soil that was carefully sorted through for roots and rhizomes.

Post pluck, time to sit on the back deck and drink a beer. Don't forget the Deet!

On my last day of fieldwork I flew out to the Burn Site to make a series of chamber measurements. These are some pictures of fog that was rolling around a valley we flew over. Pretty breathtaking!

~Adios~

This week I left Toolik Lake and began my journey south. I am currently in Woods Hole, MA but come Wednesday I will be hopping in my car and moving Gainesville, Florida. Next summer I will be returning to AK to begin work on my graduate research. Check back for more pictures then!

Thanks to everyone at Toolik who made it an incredibly fun and productive home for my last two summers. I will try to sneak my way back whenever possible!

The days blend into one...

The last few weeks I have been working hard to try and get everything done before I leave for Florida in early August. This picture is from one of my many field visits to the Anaktuvuk River Burn. The bugshirt is sadly very necessary- see the mosquitoes flying around my head?

This is the plexiglass chamber and infrared gas analyzing system I use to measure the net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide at the burn. We are studying photosynthesis and respiration from plants and soil to better understand how the tundra's carbon balance recovers following a fire. All this is pretty exciting until a mosquito flies into the machine and the numbers start to go a bit crazy!

I took this picture from the helicopter in early July. The white border visible beyond the lake is due to an abundance of Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum) flowers within the footprint of the 2007 fire. Just this week the folks I will be working with in Florida and my current boss published a paper on this fire in Nature. If you are on a university network, you should be able to access the paper here... if you don't have access to the journal, the BBC has a nice article on the fire here.

A very shaggy caribou I came across near our site in the Imnavait creek watershed

Late summer thunderstorms make for some very dramatic clouds over the Brooks Range

Double Rainbow?!?

Brave hikers wearing shorts for traipsing across the mosquito infested tundra on our Sunday off

Crossing the Sagavanirktok River

My what big paws you have?
Sidenote- I hope you all appreciate the hot-pink nail polish I am rocking up here

Beautiful view from the top of Longo's Pyramid

Will Daniels does not fit in the backseat of the truck very happily

The following Sunday (gasp, two off in a row?!) a group of us went to climb Flattop Mountain. Pretty awesome scenery!

Moss garden near the top of Flattop, looking west towards the Dalton highway

Mid-July at the Burn and the Cottongrass flowers have already begun to die down. The open space and bright sky at this site always make me think of the prairie.

Cloudberries (Rubus chamaemorus ) are edible, but I think they taste awful

Nasty f$^*@(s

Site marker at the Burn