Posts tagged #birch

Dirty Paws and Furry Coat, and the Forest of Talking Trees pt.1

Flashback Friday

Forest of Talking Trees

Today I will take you to one of my absolute favorite places in the whole world. My field site, called CPCRW, short for Caribou-Poker Creek Research Watershed.

The watershed is mainly black spruce, but also quite an abundance of deciduous vegetation, and have a lot of different small and big creatures. We start going out already in May (sometimes even late April), even though most of the snow hasn't even melted yet. Early in the season most of the watershed is brown and you could still see leftover dead plants from last years summer.

The fieldwork doesn't come for free, and if you by chance forget to use mosquito spray you will most likely end up like the pictures below will show. Another thing about mosquitos a lot of people don't understand, if you think there are a lot of mosquitos in the interior and north of Alaska, multiply that by 100 and that is probably closer to the reality. You can not survive without mosquito repellant.

We hike in rubber boots because yeah, we follow rivers. Mosquito spray or a bug shirt is needed.

We Follow Rivers

I have a poster I printed with tons of small pictures I have taken in the watershed through the years and through the seasons. I call it "We follow rivers", because that is what we do. We sample water and try to understand how changes in the landscape affect the streamwater chemistry. Alaska is underlained by permafrost, both continuous and discointinuous, and of course the most southern part is permafrost free. Few people comprehend how large Alaska actually is. Like Sweden it's pretty long, but longer of course (1420 miles; 2285km). Permafrost stores a lot of carbon, old carbon, since it's literally ground that has been frozen (and still is to certain extent) for hundreds and thousands of years. One of the important questions is "How much carbon is being released when permafrost thaws?", because permafrost throughout Alaska is thawing due to the increase in temperature. And of course, we also have the increase in fires and how that actually affects the landscape and stream water chemistry.

We follow rivers and investigate our own research questions and the underlying question about how thawing permafrost affect streamwater chemistry.

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If I could make a soundtrack for my fieldsite, the lead song would definetely be: Of Monsters and Men - "Dirty Paws"

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Ann Rumbleinthearctic and filed under The great wide open, Alaska, Flashback Friday, Science and tagged Permafrost permafrost degradation Alaska science stream chemistry Boreal Forest Black Spruce birch tracks wolf tracks 2016 Adventure Spring field Fieldwork Life in Alaska.

Moving alone

Moving time

Well, you know the feeling when you are moving, it finally struck me. I am kind of panicking. How much fits in a car? Also, I do not want to put everything in the car. I am not bringing any furniture, only clothes and some items, which seem to be adding up. I have slowly been moving the past year, and when W came up this March he brought back a whole suitcase of my stuff. How much stuff can you own?? Completely crazy. Luckily I have managed to get almost all of my furniture sold! Success for me. This mean we have some gas money for the ride. And I don't think we will have to throw away or give away too much. I would say I have been pretty good. I also realized that I have to clean out my office.

Right now we have such a nice weather, sunny and 79℉, YES 79℉ (26℃)!! can you believe? It is suppose to be even warmer tomorrow. On Sunday my plan is to go into the park (Denali National Park), my last adventure i Alaska, but the forecast calls for rain :/ . My plan for tomorrow is to go and get water and then finishing up cleaning.

As I wrote in my previous post we have a lot of pollen in the air, not as much as May 2nd, but still a lot. My car is so covered with pollen, it's actually kind of crazy, don't think I have ever seen it quite like that. Apparently mold values are really high too right now. Birch and Alder are also pretty high.

Here are some pictures from the past couple of weeks.

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Ann Rumbleinthearctic and filed under Alaska, Cabin Life, Nature and tagged pollen birch alder Alaska 2016 Cabin Life_ Spruce Nature.

Something is in the air...

Breaking Records

A couple of days ago Fairbanks broke yet another record. This Year is really turning out to be some kind of new record year when it comes to long-term monitoring. On May 2nd Fairbanks measured birch pollen at 4290 grains per cubic meter of air. Tanana Valley Clinic has this neat webpage where you can se the daily counts of all the different pollen counts. Now, to put that number in perspective, 175 grains per cubic meter of air is considered high...

I for once didn't actually notice that there was a big pollen day, and I figured that I am probably more sensitive to one of the other pollen contributors. Today Birch, Spruce and Alder has been high so my guess is that I am either sensitive to Spruce or Alder.

Science

When I was googling away I came across an old article about tree pollen, and it showed the general order of the different tree species and their pollen in the Boreal Forest, which I thought was pretty neat.

I really wanted to take a picture of the pollen I saw flying around in the air yesterday evening, but didn't really succeed, so I took a picture of my car instead.

How is the pollen where you guys are at? Some webpages says that Fairbanks broke the world record for birch pollen on May 2nd, but then one page is saying that Denmark had the previous record and another one says Sweden, so I am not sure about that. What I do know is that we did at least break the record for Fairbanks itself.