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 

My First Bog!

Taking a new perspective on the lovely bogs of Northern Alberta, I am a Villanova undergrad helping out with the project this summer.  Eric and I were wide eyed and eager for our trip up North, ready to get our hands and our boots a little dirty.  After cleaning, organizing, and analyzing in the lab we were very excited to see the real thing. 

After a couple easy flights we landed in Edmonton and headed up to Athabasca.  Excited by the saltwater pool at the hotel, we had a fun night before the real work began.  Then, the next day we headed to Athabasca University, prepping for all our sites: constructing the sippers, cutting boardwalk pieces, and getting all the materials we needed.  Then, after a long day at the garage, we got a good night of sleep and headed up to Fort Mac.  On the way, a site near Conklin was scouted, but to no avail.  We did get to see our first bear of the trip (kind of accidentally) as we were turning around to plan what to do next.  It ended up being a day off due to the new site not being what we were looking for (sigh).  So, the true fieldwork had to wait one more day.  We got up to Fort Mac, a little confused at how such a bustling town can be this far North, but actually really liked the town's unique charm.

Boots and Bogs

So, Friday comes and we head to MacKay to tackle the first site.  With Kel's and Kim's crash course in everything bog related, we were ready for veg collection.  We quickly learned the difference in root color of Fuscum and Capillifolium, had to scrape off Ledum from our gloves (the new growth is pretty sticky in early June), and tried not to get too stuck in one of the wetter bogs we went to over the week.  While it took some practice and quite a few questions, Eric and I quickly became pros at spotting all 10 species we were gathering.  With the help of SIU, Caitlyn, Yev, Kristen, Kim. and Kel, we cruised through veg and water collections at MacKay and then went to JPH4 where we got that finished pretty quickly as well.  I had never been in a bog before so I got quite a few pictures after I figured out my best path so that I wouldn't get stuck.

Eric at MacKay

The Mighty Kel

The next day was our first new site day.  We arrived at the site which we named Kearl and loaded up as much as we could to take out closer to the site.  As Kim mentioned, we had already seen a bear on the way and it was pretty clear that this is one of the more "off the beaten path" sites.  It was a hot and steamy day so we got to work right away to hopefully finish a bit early.  We hammered a lot of nails, pounded in posts, and set up everything pretty quickly on the site.  Then, with the help of SIU we struggled through getting veg for the sites (a couple of the samples were hard to find at some of the plots) and started packing up to get back to Fort Mac.  That's when Jeremy called us about the bear.  With this being the first wild bear I had seen while I am not in a car, you would think I would be cautious and careful, but no, I pulled out my phone to get a good video of the bear instead.  After a bit I realized, wow that was dumb, and pulled out my bear spray instead.  But, the bear sauntered on by and left us alone.

JPH4

The last three sites, McMurray Bog, Anzac, and Horse Creek, all went without too many problems and the rest of the week was pretty smooth sailing.  McMurray Bog was pretty dry on the walk out there and no one went for an unintended swim, the rain wasn't too strong at Anzac, and the Horse Creek setup went quickly now that we were pros at setting up a site. 
I was honestly a bit sad to leave Fort Mac, but was excited by the thought of our nice hotel beds waiting for us back in Athabasca.  We then made quick work of wrapping things up and headed back to Philly and the lab.  Overall, I know both Eric and I learned a lot being out in the field as well as had a good time with it.  Other than a few less horseflies, no complaints from me.  I can't wait to get back up there next month!!

The Bear!!

A new fan of peatland bogs,

Spencer

The Bears Will Wait

Heading back to the trucks post bear

There are fieldwork days and there are fieldwork days.  Site set-up days are the latter. Full of hauling, and hammering, and organization, all told, our set-ups this trip went pretty smoothly.  At our first, there were 12 of us eager and ready.  I pulled out my flagging tape and forged the path pre-delimited.  We trooped in with raw lumber, t-posts, weather station, electric fence supplies, nails, hammers, chainsaw, sample bags, spectral analysis equipment, water wells, augers, post-pounders, sphagnometers, resin tubes, hose clamps, funnels, nut-drivers, loppers.  Within 30 minutes everyone was smoothly onto jobs most have probably never done before.  It was to hit 31 C this day according to the newly deployed weather station and the horseflies provoked.

Our crew is great.  Our VU contingent is 7 strong – including two new undergrads who are experiencing the wilds up here for the first time.  Spencer and Eric are great additions to our team – they are already comfortable ID-ing Ledum, know leaves on bog rosemary are opposite and not alternate, and can tell Evernia from Usnea.  Power tools, hammers, chainsaws, big trucks – no problems.   I’m proud of everyone.  It has not always gone to plan on this trip, but it never does, and rolling with it and improvising have been and continue to be strengths for us all– qualities all field ecologists need in spades.  Joining our VU crew, the SIU team set up with us, and it was just right.  They are family.

But I digress….   the set up.  I heard a ring.  Jeremy was calling.  The SIU crew had just finished up and had headed to their diesel.  I had one more thing to do in the bog and the VU crew would be right behind them.  Jeremy is calm: “There is a bear in the cutline just hanging out – I don’t mean to be alarmist, but you should know.”  I decided the last thing on my agenda could wait.  I walked out of the bog with Caitlyn to where the crew waited and to where the bear decided to explore.  Eric was yelling at the bear and waving his arms.  Our group tried to look large.  The bear seemed nonplussed.  I hit the airhorn.  The bear just looked at us. Again, with the airhorn - to the point, where it became obvious to me that airhorns are good for notifying your friends that you might be in trouble, but might not be the best at motivating a bear to curb its enthusiasm.  Good to know.  Kel had his bear spray at the ready.  Ten meters away, the bear stared, curious, and ambled, slowly, into the bog. 

That was the second bear of the day for us – the first was a beautiful Cinnamon roused from its grazing near the road.  I personally saw 5 bears this trip – all but the curious one, from the safety of our F-150.  It could be an interesting year.

Jeremy Hartsock took this pic of the Cinnamon from the SIU truck. A Boreal beauty.

It is now 6 C and raining and we are driving back to Athabasca.  Thoughts of snow-tube extraction from Crow Lake niggled at us this past 24 hours or so, but today is not the day.  We have until October and hopefully conditions will be better next trip - or the next - I’m not complaining.  My joints are tired.  I think we are all ready to head home and take a day or two to realign our alternate realities back home;  I know I am.   For now, the bears, bugs, and bogs will have to wait.  The beers, however, will not.  Cheers from Alberta!  

Veg Picking Doldrums

I heard on NPR the other day that Moscow had its darkest month ever recorded with only 6 minutes of sunshine for the entire month of December, 2017. This, down from an average of 18 hours of sunshine/month. I’m having a hard time imagining either scenario.  That said, it has felt terribly dreary this winter with some pretty serious cold temps keeping us inside a lot of the time.  Our inside winter jobs have kept us busy in our pursuit to finally catch up on a backlog of samples and as the lab chugs along and the days grow longer, we start thinking about the upcoming field season.

We will have a busy field season, and I think I can speak for us all when I say that we look forward to getting outside into the wilds and out of our veg cleaning doldrums.   

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

97 Days

     It takes a lot of work to prepare a research team for a summer fieldwork campaign, but somehow we always manage to do it. The last few weeks have been busy getting paperwork finalized, gathering supplies, tying loose ends, and finding passports. As I was filling out my Canadian customs card on the flight to Edmonton, I was counting the exact number of days I would be staying in Canada before my return to the US, and I concluded that it was ninety-seven days! That is a long time to be in another country, away from home. But the great thing about being here every summer for the past few years is that I feel like Athabasca IS my home. I am very excited to be in Alberta once again, doing the fieldwork that I love so much. Bring on the bogs!

     Hope and I arrived in Athabasca late Thursday night. The weather is warm and dry, with perfectly blue skies. But with warm, dry weather comes wildfire. There was a wildfire raging last week in the city of Fort McMurray, 250 km north of Athabasca, near the oil sands mining operations. All 80,000 residents were evacuated overnight on May 3rd. More than 2,000 homes have been destroyed by fire. While the fire has moved away from the town center it is still burning hot in the surrounding boreal forests. Even now the residents have yet to be allowed back into their community. They are essentially refugees in their own province. 

200,000 hectares of land burned by wildfire in the Fort McMurray region from May 1st to May 8th, 2016.

     There was a Fort McMurray relief concert on Saturday at the Athabasca riverfront. It’s rare that we take time off away from the peatlands to participate in the town’s activities, but this was a good cause to support. There was music, barbecue, and a donation collection to support the fire relief fund. The headlining band was a group of Fort McMurray musicians, calling themselves the Fort Mac Refugee Band. Athabasca may be a small, but the people sure know how to support each other in times of need.

     We are lucky to be working with the wonderful people at Athabasca University. Everyone has been so helpful with getting us set up in our house and allowing us to store our trucks during the winter, and even offering to help us bring our equipment out of storage. The facilities office at AU is the best.

     Hope and I are getting things ready for the arrival of the rest of the Villanova team including Mikah, returning grad student, Wendy, prospective grad student, 2 undergrads from Villanova, Libby and Yevgeniya, and an undergrad from Virginia Tech, Caitlyn. As well as the usual suspects, Kel, Melanie, and Kim. We look forward to meeting up with the rest of the summer 2016 crew. 

Welcome

Welcome to the 55th Parallel.  Our ecological research in Canada takes us above and just below the 55th parallel in Alberta, and in the summer, we utilize our 17 hours of sunlight to the fullest. In the winter, when thankfully we aren't busy up there, the sun is above the horizon for not quite 7 hours.  It is a great place to work if you can fend off the black flies and bears -- and there are plenty of both.  The wetlands in which we work are teeming with life of all kinds, and these systems are beautiful.


This blog's inspiration comes from wanting to share some of what we know and some of what we experience while doing research both here at VU and in Canada.  We are exposed to some great people, fascinating terrain, and quality research.  Throughout the next few months, in particular, as we delve into the busy summer field season, we'll share what is happening with us and our group and we welcome feedback and insights.

Our research takes us primarily to Alberta Canada where we focus on disturbances both anthropogenic and natural.  We work in peatlands, which in this part of the world, are dominated by treed bogs and both treed and open fens.  Within these wetland systems, we work to tease apart nutrient cycling under the umbrella of fire, pollution, and climate change scenarios.  We do this because peatlands store vast amounts of carbon and other nutrients, and it is this carbon that could potentially be released back into the atmosphere, given changing conditions, thus further contributing in some way to global climate change.

We hope to share with the world (and friends and family) why these systems are so incredibly important, our love for the ecosystem, and the science that drives it all.  We will have posts from graduate students, undergraduates, professors, technicians, and hopefully some interesting guest writers.

And so, welcome.