Tundra Vegetation Coming to Life

Most of my research thus far has been conducted during the winter months; geophysical surveys in September; collection of permafrost samples in April; and installation of water samplers in May. The snow is now gone, however, and our team is getting to see the first signs of Spring in the North Slope.  Interestingly, the first signs are subtle. On closer examination, however, there is a lot taking place. The low-growing willows are flowering, as are other plants on the tundra. The sedges and grasses are beginning to appear in wet areas like the troughs around low- and high-centered polygons. Members of our team have commented that one of our goals (that of documenting how water, nutrients, and carbon are all inter-connected in these Arctic landscapes) is already apparent. You can imagine the differences between wet and dry areas, each with unique nitrogen dynamics, and the resulting impact on vegetation patterns and flux of CO2 and CH4.

Rich Norby, Alistair Rogers, Margaret Torn, Jessie Cable, and two post-docs Victoria Sloan and Melanie Hahn are studying this cascade of processes. This team has been busy this week taking measurements and samples, and installing nutrient exchange resins, all for accessing the dynamic interplay between water, nitrogen, and biogeochemical cycling of carbon. Only a limited amount of data have been collected so far, but more will be collected as the summer progresses.

Trails Support NGEE Arctic Science

Today, we completed laying out trail mat to our field sites. It was a well-defined task that required two days of intensive work by three or four people from our team. What we ended up with is a trail that now does two things. It protects the tundra from disturbance caused by foot traffic, we all feel good that the site will not suffer from our repeated trips across the tundra. In addition, we can now, within the first month of our field season, ensure that NGEE Arctic scientists and collaborators can access plots for the fundamental science we intend to conduct. Measurements can be co-located within specific areas and our team can take measurements and obtain samples from similar ice-wedge polygons that dot the landscape. This will ensure that our team will remain integrated, as will our science, as we focus our attentions on delivering a process-rich model of landscape dynamics for the Arctic coastal plain. Mission accomplished...

Barrow Boardwalks

Those who have followed this blog will remember that our team laid out trail mat across the tundra in May. At the time, we transported almost 800 meters of trail mat to our site and positioned individual one meters sections end-to-end so that we formed pathways to each of our four research plots.

The challenge this trip was to connect the many pieces into safe and solid surface for walking. The GeoBlock trail mat has interlocking tabs that can be screwed together. That seems to work well, but placing screws and using a drill with gloves proved cumbersome in an initial test last May, so I have been looking for an alternative. I thought of cable ties, which would have worked, but they would be expensive. In searching the web, I found reference to double loop wire ties used to connect rebar. I ordered 2500 ties, each 9 inches long, and a couple of twisting tools with the thought that they would be quick, effective, and inexpensive.

They worked great!  Joanne Childs (ORNL), Jessie Cable (UAF) and I could place sections of trail mat end-to-end, wrap one of the loop ties through the mat, and twist the ties into place. We could connect two pieces in under a minute and build long sections in just 5 minutes. These could then be easily carried into the field of placement to each of our polygon plots.

Right now, we are almost finished with this task. We have built a trail and added spur trails that now allow our NGEE Arctic team to access vegetation, hydrology, and biogeochemical plots. This should really facilitate data collection as we get our field season underway.

I'll post more detailed pictures tomorrow.

Barrow is Warming Up!

The last time we traveled to Barrow, we conducted field studies in temperatures that approached -25F below zero. Today, we stepped off the airplane and were greeted by unseasonably warm temperatures that rose well above 45F. Given that magnitude of a temperature swing over a period of a month,  it should come as no surprise that most of the snow has melted; a sure sign of summer. The other sure sign of summer is the report we received from Tony from UMIAQ when he picked us up at the airport - "We saw our first mosquito yesterday!"

It was a long trip from Boulder to Barrow, but it was good to meet up with my colleagues from ORNL, LANL, BNL, and UAF. We signed in and received a safety briefing from UMIAQ, picked up our vehicles, and unpacked a few boxes that had been delivered earlier.

With 24 hours of daylight, we took our time getting organized, then met with Mark Ivey in the Barrow Arctic Research Center. Mark works with the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and has years of experience working in the Barrow area. He has been helpful in locating laboratory space for those in our project who need quality lab space for trace gas measurements, sample preparation, etc. Lab space is at a premium in Barrow and fortunately Mark had space that he was not using and offered it in support of the NGEE Arctic project. Once we discussed safety-related issues of the laboratory, we spent a couple of hours moving in a gas chromatograph, leaf area meter, balance, oven, and miscellaneous field and lab supplies. 

We then drove out CakeEater Road and walked out to the control shed on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). This was a good time to look over the field plots and examine the differences in vegetation across the low- and high-centered polygons. During previous trips to Barrow, the ground was covered in snow and today was the first time we got a good look at the snow-free landscape. It will take a few days to sort out our plot design, especially for those working on the vegetation dynamics task of our project. We have a good team, however, and they are up to the challenge.

ABoVE and Beyond...

Eric Kasischke, University of Maryland, and his team have done a good job of bringing people together from multiple disciplines to discuss key science questions for the ABoVE project. These questions reflect the strengths of the NASA Terrestrial Ecosystems program and are highly relevant to regional and global climate models, land managers, and society.

The scientists assembled for this workshop are actively engaged, with the emphasis and the majority of our time spent in one or more breakout groups. Each group is tasked with looking at a set of questions from one of several perspectives in hopes that we can develop an overall compelling vision for the ABoVE project. It is clear that the team leading ABoVE have already given this considerable thought and our input this week will supplement or fine-tune the vision already developed in previous scoping workshops. It is obvious that there are numerous points of potential interaction between ABoVE and NGEE Arctic. Our process studies and emphasis on scaling could complement and indeed benefit from a close association with ABoVE.

Although the majority of our time has been spent in breakout discussions, there were a series of plenary talks. One of those was presented by Dave McGuire (UAF) who spoke about critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of Arctic systems. Another presentation by Piers Seller (NASA) highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of current Earth System Models. He derived many of his comments from a NASA-sponsored workshop held in May to discuss the state of  "Arctic Boreal Modeling". This was an outstanding presentation and, in summarizing the workshop, Piers emphasized that the needs of the climate model community could clearly be met by the ABoVE project. Much like the NGEE Arctic project, ABoVE would want to target key uncertainties in the models and identify strategies for scaling process-based studies to that of the scale of climate model grid cells. My discussions with Eric and his leadership team is that NGEE Arctic could uniquely contribute to ABoVE in two important ways. One would be to conduct process-level studies in support of gaining new knowledge needed to reduce model uncertainties. We view this as a strength of our project and our planned integration of surface and subsurface sciences. Another contribution would be in providing a multiscale modeling framework that ultimately would link to remote-sensing products generated through ABoVE. We could use these data products to evaluate model performance at scales relevant to climate models.

In addition to the plenary talks and group discussions, I had a couple good interactions with Michelle Walvoord, who is with the US Geological Survey. Michelle and her colleagues have used an airborne electromagnetic system to characterize permafrost to depths of several 100 meters. The approach provides information, for example, on active layer thickness and talik conditions beneath thaw lakes in the Alaska. Our NGEE Arctic geophyics team, led by Susan Hubbard at LBNL, has looked into this approach as a complement to our ground-based EM, GPR, and seismic measurements in Barrow.

I also spoke with Ted Hogg, who is with the Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada. Ted has made a series of observations of aspen mortality in boreal forests. It appears that this die-off of trees is initiated by drought, that then pre-disposes trees to insects and disease. The exact mechanism of mortality is unknown, although it is just this mechanism that represents a critical uncertainty in ecosystem and climate models that needs to be tackled in the coming years.

I leave Boulder for Alaska later this evening. My all night flight will allow me to join others from our team in Barrow tomorrow. We have a lot of work to do in the next week and it will be great to visit our plots now that snow melt has occurred. I will post pictures and updates once we get underway.

Preparations in Fairbanks

This morning we took care of some last minute jobs.  This included purchasing a printer for the NGEE lab, a cordless harmer drill for placing marker posts in the tundra, and for Margaret, painting some PVC pipe in a parking lot. 

Bear safety is a complex issue that became at lot clearer after attending Joe Nava's Bear Safety Course this afternoon.  We learned a lot from a no-nonsense, straight-talking, bear expert, including how to recognize different bear behavior, the use of bear spray, and instruction on the safe use of shotguns for bear defense. It was a great course and "team veggie" did some good shooting.

Boulder, then Barrow

My travel plans usually call for me to fly from Knoxville to Anchorage and then onto Barrow. This week, my travel plans include a detour to Boulder, Colorado where I will represent the NGEE Arctic project at a NASA ABoVE workshop.  The Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) is led by Eric Kasischke, Scott Goetz, John Kimball, Michele Mack, and others.  Research carried out as part of ABoVE would provide the opportunity to not only focus on key process associated with the land surface, but on key interfaces between the land, coastal oceans, and atmospheric boundary layer as they interact with climate-mediated terrestrial processes. There are strong connections between the DOE-sponsored NGEE Arctic project and ABoVE, so I am looking forward to interacting with this group to understand their goals and how our field studies can contribute.  NGEE Arctic and ABoVE are both consistent with the recently released Interagency IARPC Arctic Research Plan (http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/arctic/iarpc/arc_res_plan_index.jsp) which calls for interagency collaboration in the study of Arctic systems.

During the workshop, later this morning in fact, I have the opportunity to present a "speed talk" that will highlight the NGEE Arctic project.  A 5-minute snippet of our team, our goal and scientific approach, and how others can become engaged in the project.  My four slides include:

We have already had multiple requests from university faculty and national laboratory staff who have expressed an interest in collaborations.  We have had a few inquiries from potential international collaborators as well.

My poster will be similar to the one presented recently at the DOE Terrestrial Ecosystem Science (TES) PI Meeting, April 23-24 in Washington, DC.

  

A copy of this poster and two others that our team presented at the PI meeting can be downloaded at the NGEE Arctic web site (http://ngee.ornl.gov/).