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. 

Flowers and Field

Posted by Kim

I drove by Meanook on my way to the airport this weekend.  I’m not sure why.  I suppose I knew it would only take a few minutes and I wanted to see an old friend and drive down dusty roads.  Through the chained gate I could see all the old buildings, quiet and abandoned.  I could almost hear the laughter and the power tools and see people playing street hockey in the pickup-truck-laden parking lot.  The grass was mowed, and flowers bloomed behind locks and barriers and cameras designed to keep such riff-raff as me out. I was simultaneously happy and sad- but mostly sad.  Time keeps ticking on, and so do we - evolving with the challenges and difficulties that change with the days and years.  

I was heading home from a week of field work.

Our living space this year is better than we could have ever hoped, given our motel experience last year.  We have open space and a beautiful kitchen and it is fairly close to the lab.  I talked a little bit about the house earlier on the blog and I only have good things to say still.  Our crew is also fantastic.  They are a great group of people and there are many stories, but it is about the time of year when folks start thinking about the end, and the big push needed to finish up the work.  Thoughts of home or vacation or anything but field work start creeping in and it is far enough into the work for everyone to really start to get a handle on each other’s personalities (such a variety of I's and E's!) and what makes each other tick and maybe even what buttons to push here and there.  I learned many things, even this week. Kelly, for example, LOVES to pick wild berries. John likes to talk about conspiracy theories with Graham. Agrima is totally into watching Wall-E, but no one else is. Rob carries swim trunks in his field pack. Sharon and I are least likely to be psychopaths.   We all have our quirks, but I think we all like Saskatoon pie.   I was pleasantly aware of how well folks were getting along and how dedicated and good natured everyone is.

I'm proud of our group, and I’ve missed these people.  I’ve missed the bogs and the bugs and the drives, even, in a strange sort of way.  I’ve definitely missed the work.  There is nothing like spending the day tromping around in a bog.  You sort of take it for granted when you are there full time doing it day in and day out, but these visits are good for me to keep my perspective alive.  It was a good week of work for me and I am glad I could go.  

There is much left to do, but I know the crew will have fun doing it and that all is well there in the middle of Alberta.  The flowers are blooming and the grass is cut and the Saskatoons are ubiquitous, ripe, and being picked.  

Good luck, everybody!!

A view of Athabasca

flights, weddings, mineralization.

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.