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By Leslie Boby, M.S. Alumna '07
Recently graduated SNRE masters student, Leslie Boby, offers a glimpse into her fieldwork and research experience during two summers in the scenic and rugged interior of Alaska.
A Grizzly bear sighting was an exciting event that sometimes interfered with field sampling. Photo courtesy of Leslie Boby
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A day in the life of the field researcher...
The road is dusty, gravel-covered with steep embankments on both sides, making it difficult for parking our field truck, a Ford F250 -- with extended bed and cab. Traffic, while not frequent, is steady and mostly includes large speeding trucks on their way up or down from the North Slope, or tourist buses driving the 500-mile distance from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. My field assistant Laura watches the GPS while I drive. As we get closer to one of 90 sites, she gives me distances. 500 m, 400 m, 300 m, etc. and I scan the area to find a decent place to pull off and leave the truck. As we are parking we see a car stopped on the road ahead, Laura assumes they are stopping to see wildlife, but cannot see what is drawing their attention.
A few seconds later, she realizes it's a GRIZZLY BEAR and that its 30 meters from us. That was one site we didn't get to that day! We drove a little further up the road to safety to watch the adolescent, sandy colored grizzly bear grub for roots along the roadside. The young male kept at his task, seemingly undisturbed by the watching cars and the other occasional passing vehicles.
Grizzly bears, moose, mosquitoes as big as birds, and the odd porcupine are the potential 'hazards' to watch out for while doing fieldwork here in interior Alaska. We were on the Dalton Highway that day, popularly called the haul road, for the trucks that take supplies to the oil fields and back. We were just shy of the Arctic Circle and in the middle of millions of acres of boreal black spruce forest.
My Research
The boreal forest system, which spreads across the northern latitudes of the globe stores more than 30% of terrestrial carbon, is known mostly for its homogenous stands of black and white spruce trees (picea mariana and glauca), early successional stages of aspen (populus tremuloides) and birch (betula spp) and thick layers of barely decomposed soil organic matter. It's this thick humus, which makes the boreal forest so unique and of great interest for ecosystem ecologists. Wildfire is the defining disturbance mechanism in the boreal forest and the dense even-aged stands of black spruce with low-hanging branches (forming a fire-ladder up the tree) have evolved to survive and thrive with the influence of fire. When the boreal forest burns, the majority of the trees die and the serrotinous black spruce cones are able to release their seeds.
Leslie Boby sampling soil in the field. Photo courtesy Leslie Boby
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Under the guidance of Ecosystem Ecologists Drs. Michelle Mack and Ted Schuur, I tested a new method of measuring the severity of fire (or how much biomass burned away) by looking at little roots on the trunks of the burned black spruce trees. These adventitious roots are about the same height as the soil organic matter, before the fire, so measuring the height of these roots above the remaining organic soil can tell us what was there before fire. Our sites were selected to represent the spectrum of fire severity, from barely singed to complete ash. Six million acres of the boreal forest burned in wildfires in 2004 across interior Alaska and my field research sites spanned a 250,000 km2 portion of the burned area.
We also sampled the organic soil horizons in the field and brought back more than 1500 samples to the lab at UF for processing. From these samples, we were able to calculate the carbon and nitrogen content of the soils and then figure out the size of the nutrient pools and how much was lost due to fire. Ultimately, we hope to be able to link our fire severity patterns to post-fire forest composition. Because climate change is increasing the frequency of forest fires in these northern latitudes, by quantifying what is lost will help us understand what the future holds for these forests.
Leslie Boby spent two summers researching in Alaska and came back in October 2007 to defend her Master's Thesis.
Additional information on Leslie's research and Alaskan Wildlife:
http://www.becru.uaf.edu/JFSP.htm
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