May Days in the Bogs

Posted by Kim

     

What is this?  A new post?  Nothing since last July?   What the what is THAT about?

New computers sometimes don't play nice

Well, I'm here to tell you, things have happened, and things are happening now.  Caitlyn and I are just finishing up the start of the Summer 2019 season and it is good to be back doing field work.  Not too many stories (we've seen snow and bears and monster mosquitoes and some kind of Mustelid and almost hit a Kestrel and saw hawks and ravens galore and broke through ice and changed out 72 resin tubes and set 1500 crank wires), but we surely have had a productive time.  Life is somewhat allergy-ridden here for me in Fort Mac as I type, but we are off to Edmonton by tomorrow eve.  Things just keep on moving.   

Here are some pics:

Would Kel be proud?  mmmmm 

The Smell of Fort McMurray in the Morning

Posted by:  Kim

Welcome to Field Season 2017!

    Starting it off with a bang, Kel and I are tackling Fort McMurray sites and doing a fine job of it.  No bugs, no rain, no sun, no problem.  Actually, there were bits of each of those things today, but we weren't counting.  Day one went great and we look forward to tomorrow's adventure.   
 Sorry for the tease, but I'm making this short and sweet.  We have some planning to do for tomorrow and some good Fort McMurray food to find for dinner.  We'll have plenty to talk about soon.  It has been too long.  We've all missed the mosses and I'm excited to share scoop on our summer plans and what has been going on over the winter.     For now, I can assure you - the mosses are still here and it makes me happy to be walking among them - so lavish and green.

      

 Posted by Kim

Black Spruce cones form in clumps high up on branches near the tops of trees.  They are considered serotinous. That is to say, these specialized trees depend on fire to help release their seeds to the world.  The trees bear slowly-opening cones for 25 - 75 - 100 years until a fire sweeps through to rapidly open the cones to disperse their seeds to the charred peat.   They have evolved to survive in a world in which fire is expected – and up here, that return interval is estimated at just over 120 years.   You would be hard pressed to find spruce trees older here in the bogs of Alberta, and we can tell you where a few are, but they are rare rare rare.  We also think that the fire return interval is likely shrinking.  Fires are predicted to increase in intensity and to happen more often. This is all part of the climate story of the world.  

The Fort Mac fire has recently been categorized as being held, and it has surely released a multitude of black spruce seeds – many in our study sites.  It has also burned a bit of our equipment and more importantly, some beautiful landscape is now black and crunchy. The town itself seems to be recovering as well.  They don’t let you into the residential areas that were nearly completely demolished, but the town seems to be chugging along with most things back open.

 

I just spent a few days there with Caitlyn and Wendy and we rolled along the truck-filled roads with our aim on science. We breathed in bad smelling air and watched stacks billow brown tinged ‘steam’.  The big business of oil sands was back up and running.

At Anzac, the first site we visited, the constant buzz of bugs was punctuated by helicopters carrying water bucket after water bucket to nearby hotspots.  Bright green Cloud Berry leaves and Labrador Tea plants were starkly tender on the charred peat; and a month post fire,  where I stood, life was returning.

Along with Anzac, McMurray Bog was also partially burned with the Black Spruce taking the brunt of the damage at both sites. Another site, Mildred, was a total burn.  Two other sites were left unscathed and wait for the next fire to open their cones.  The science moves on. 

These bogs are resilient and I am glad to see that life springs anew sometimes even because of great tragedy.  We will return again in a few weeks and I'm sure we will find new and green freshness springing from darkness.

Science On

Thanks, Kelly, for your great update yesterday!   Athabasca has been our home for a long long time and I look forward to joining Kelly and Hope on Tuesday to start our field season.  Our hearts go out to the people of Fort McMurray, many of whom still do not know if they have homes still standing or a place to return to.  They all wait for word that they can head back to Fort McMurray to see what the fire has left them.

We, too, await word.  We are starting our field season, and it is shaping up to be an odd and possibly treacherous one.  Field work, in general, trends to the tenuous, and we have had to wait to get up to some of our sites before because of fire, but this year is beyond precedent.  We have two sites that may have burned.  We won’t know until we show up.  One is just south of the airport and one is just north of Anzac.  The MODIS satellite imagery has them both questionable. Our sites are the green dots in purple lettering.

Two of our bogs (green dots) amid a see of yellow, orange, and red dots indicating age of fire with red being most recent...  Image was taken off Google Earth May 5th.  The fire has spread into and off the borders of this image since.

This fire season is already in full swing and it is only May.  This year it officially started in March, and since then, the area has seen 30+C weather and a paucity of rain.  The fire threat is Extreme for all of our field sites currently, and the Fort McMurray fire is still burning, and, as of this morning, is just over 251,000 hectares large with several areas still out of control.  There are currently over 1,000 firefighters and firefighting personnel, 134 pieces of heavy equipment, 39 helicopters, and 11 airtankers working on this wildfire, alone.  It remains impressive and devastating and we are holding our collective breath.

All this being said, we are still looking forward to the new field season and I’m excited to get the crew together to start our work this year in the Boreal.  We return to the house where we were last year, and are lucky to do so.  Our colleagues have not been so lucky – some of whom have lost houses in Fort Mac or the ability to get up to the area to do any of their research.  At least we have several projects still in unburned areas and we can start our work.  I expect there may be some camping happening in the Fort Mac area this summer, as housing will be terribly tight.

We will be sure to keep an eye and nose to the sky and earth as we roll from site to site this summer - especially paying close attention to where we park hot trucks.  Bogs tend to hold onto fire deep into the peat, and so we will be vigilant and mindful of the potential for fires everywhere.   For now, we will do our best to keep the science moving forward.  Sites have burned in the past and sites will burn again in the future and there is always room for more questions to be answered.  So…. With that in mind: 

 Science on, crew!  

We hope to be diligent about our updates this year, so stay tuned!







Posted by Kim

Field Work Time!

A doe and her twins visit and eye us slyly from the yard:  we are their new neighbors at the bottom of the hill that angles sharply up to Athabasca University.  Instead of 18-wheelers and rowdy road workers waking us up in the mornings (last year’s motel fun), I found myself this morning moaning about an industrious woodpecker that roused me a tiny bit too early.  Our digs have improved by orders of magnitude.  Athabasca University has again made our arrival so welcoming; and this summer, we hang our hats in a building they own and maintain.  It is nestled among trees and open space and we are making it our own until our season ends this fall.  The kitchen has a commercial gas stove with 6 burners, two fridges, two sinks, two dishwashers, 1 gas oven, and 2 convection ovens.   Need I say more?  We are living in luxury.  A big shout-out to the folks that have been working so hard to make our arrival such a wonderful experience.

Our crew is arriving in two waves this year.  I am here with 5 other folks and we have been fixing things, settling in, and prepping for the summer.  The second wave arrives on Saturday (two days!) and includes not only a seasoned grad student (hey, Julia!), but also our new crew of field techs who will be experiencing bogs for the first time!  Logistically, it is a tricky thing to balance airport runs, maintenance work, site construction, and isolated research tasks, so this year we decided to mix it up with airport runs.  We look forward to the whole crew’s arrival so we can start the summer fun.  Meanwhile, today, a small group of us are heading up to Fort McMurray to set vegetation growth markers, swap out precipitation collectors for the summer and put together a new site.  We hate to leave our cushy digs in Athabasca, but we look forward to squishing through the bogs.  Our first site up is a bog we call Anzac.  It is one of my favorites. 

This is an image of part of our walk to the site, but we have yet to arrive there-- right now I am in the truck and I am happy to report that we just passed a bear – our first bear of the season!  Construction continues on the road to Fort McMurray and bear sightings along this strip are fewer than they used to be as there is a lot more dust and big construction vehicles to deal with. We will have a very busy day tomorrow as we head into the Fort Mac area where the construction is ridiculous and the air is even more dirty, but we look forward to the work and visiting our old bog friends. 

Welcome to Alberta 2015!!!