After surviving my flights from
Philadelphia that were filled with bear hunters and spirited battles for the
armrest the size of a chopstick, I’ve arrived for my fourth summer in Alberta.
Many of my friends don’t understand what it is about this place that draws me
away from the city in the summertime. I do, admittedly, miss out on some things
by being absent. (I’ve reached the age that people I know are seriously adults,
so I’m missing five (5!) weddings this summer.) Aside from getting me out of
buying someone a meat tenderizer (Card: May your love remain as tender as this
spiked hammer will make your steak), I love it for many reasons—the smell of
spruce trees, the glimpses of wildlife through a truck window, the river that
rolls through town on the journey from its glacial origin in the Rockies—that
and so much more. I get to do work that brings me outdoors every day, and makes
me feel as though I’m doing something I truly care about that has a positive
impact on the world as a whole. The other thing that keeps me coming back year
after year is the experience of living in community with other people who are
passionately working alongside me. I started as an undergraduate assistant and then began my own research as a graduate student last summer.
My project focuses on nitrogen
mineralization, or the conversion of organic nitrogen found in decaying organic
material into the chemical form preferred by plants and microbes. Spoiler
alert: not very much of it happens in our bogs, partially because the organic
nitrogen in dead things decays very slowly. The other reason is that thus far
we’ve measured net rates: that is, what’s left over when you don’t include
nitrogen-hungry microbes’ intake. This summer, I ‘m going to start
experimenting with gross rates, which will tell us how much mineralization
happens total. Obtaining those numbers might help illuminate plant-microbe
competition in the bog and avoid confounding different processes together.
This job also gives me an excuse to
take photos of some of nature’s weirder plants, lichens, and fungi. Here’s a
couple from my collection.
