Lab Days

Working hard in the Wieder Lab!  We have finally finished cleaning the 2015 vegetation samples! Most of it has been ground and measured.  Feels good to check stuff off the chart! Almost ready to start with the analysis!!

Now we have moved onto the easy stuff from August 2016.  This year doesn't look nearly brutal as the 2015 bunch.  A fan favorite of black spruce is getting picked today!

 

Today Wendy is working on the graphs for her carbon data.  Lookin' good!

To say the crew is getting a little stir crazy would be an understatement.  Here's Yevgeniya dreaming of the outside world and wishing to be out in Mariana Lake.  She sure is missing those blueberries!  

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.

      

Thoughts from an Airport

Just a few things about this summer...thank you to everyone :) 

Some thoughts from an airport.

After 84 days in the True North, I have developed some skills that only a handful of dedicated individuals have acquired. We are the Few, the Proud, the Wetland Ecologists of Villanova University. 1. I am able to sit in the backseat of a pickup truck for up to 3 hours. (No longer than that, please). Most of our field sites are at least an hour and a half away, but the dreaded trip to Red Earth Creek is a whopping 3 hours. At least there is gas station about halfway there with a wonderful snack collection. 2. I am able to sort dried vegetation all day long, pending the fact that we are also watching movies and I am not sorting cranberry. 3. I can also unstick myself from what I like to call ‘Peat Black Holes’- endless pits of doom that one might slip in at any given moment on any footpath at any site. I think I’ve mastered the effective way to wiggle out of such a predicament. (Except that one time…RIP to my left boot somewhere at Utikuma).

After just about 3 months, I have learned these brilliant, resume worthy skills, but also the process of nitrogen fixation, the correct way to insert “eh?” into any Canadian sentence, and the definition of a bog. (Supposedly there’s no water movement, but I also learned that that’s kind of not true.) I am a Tim Hortons Convert and huge fan of the Canadian Netflix selection.

This summer was nothing short of the Greatest Adventure of my Life So Far. I learned how to operate a Gas Chromatogram, collect pore water, measure photosynthesis and cellular respiration, and that Sphagnum is the “Greatest genus in the world”- Kell Weider 2016. But I also learned that Yevgenia loves to watch horror movies, Mikah is a crochet wizard, Hope only drinks cold drinks, and Kelly has a secret super power for baking Olympic themed cakes. Catilyn calls her grandfather everyday and Wendy can cook a masterpiece dinner from even the emptiest fridge. This summer was a summer spent outside, sunburned, bug bitten, but almost always happy. I am so thankful to have seen the mountains in Jasper National Park, to have raided the thrift store weekly and to have celebrated America’s birthday in Northern Alberta with the people that I did. Thanks to one wild gang. Cheers to the adventures.

 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.