In the process of mounting, glue is painted onto the back side of pressed plants and then affixed to an herbarium sheet. Washers can act as weights to hold down unruly plants.

As snow begins to descend on Anchorage, our SOS focus has returned to the herbarium. We’ve gotten to visit many spectacular places around the state and now it’s time to process the data. While that includes the curation of excel spreadsheets and confirming digital records with our field notes, it also includes managing the voucher specimens.

A voucher specimen is like a cross between a library book and a museum archive: they hold a wealth of information for the public about a specific time and place. At each site, we took plants for identification purposes. Back at the camp, these plants were identified then pressed and dried. In the herbarium, we take these voucher specimens, assign it a herbarium accession number that references information collected about the specimen– such as where it was found, what other species were there, and when it was taken—and then we mount the specimen. Mounting is a process of affixing the specimen permanently to a thick, herbarium sheet. We use special glue that won’t discolor the specimen, but the Smithsonian herbarium sews the specimen to the sheet.

All 2016 SOS specimens in various states of drying.

All voucher specimens need a label. This label is the condensed version of the numerous notes taken in the field and kept in the herbarium digital records. It has the most currently accepted scientific name, who collected the specimen, and a brief summary of location and habitat information. This helps researchers and herbarium keepers answer questions while looking through specimens, and was the best way to keep quick access records before the rise of digital archival software.

No voucher specimen would be complete without a rubber stamp of the official herbarium seal and accession number. This is the number that connects the specimen to the digital archive. Before the specimen can be stamped, it has to be completely dry – the plant, the glue, and the ink from the label. But once it’s stamped, it can join the ever-growing herbarium collection.

Mounted, labeled, and stamped, this specimen is ready to join the herbarium collection.

If you’re wondering why herbarium specimens are important to research, I recommend you read this article.

Justin Fulkerson peruses through herbarium specimens destined for mounting

I would like to take a moment and thank the wonderful people of the UAA herbarium who have been so supportive and open in teaching me the ways of the herbarium: Justin Fulkerson, Matt Carlson, Tim, and Bonnie. Thank you for creating such a lively and welcoming office.

August was an exciting time for the SOS program in Alaska. We spent two weeks collecting seed from the Steese highway and the Dalton highway. The Steese sits in the White Mountains north east of Fairbanks. The Dalton starts north of Fairbanks and traverses the Yukon River, the Brooks Range and the Arctic Circle. We made 70 collections in total. Each collection represents a single population of a species. Stringent criteria ensure our collections obtain a representative sample of a robust population without harming its reproductive potential. Because of these criteria, only common, workhorse species are collected– not endangered, threatened or rare species.

This is the final result of cleaning seed. The clean seed will be counted and then kept in plastic crates in cool, dark storage until it’s time to sell or use it.

Some of the coolest species we collected were: Triglochin palustre, a graminoid that looks and feels like barbed wire, Hedysarum alpinum, a forb whose seeds make the best money bag sound when shaken, and Beckmannia syzigachne, which seems to explode off the stem when touched. With a couple of prolific species, for example Calamagrostis canadensis or Chamerion angustifolium, we used pillowcases rather than cotton bags to hold our collection. At the end of our trip, we delivered our seed bounty to the Plant Materials Center in Palmer, Alaska.

Here a grass is being processed through a brush machine. This is the resulting mixture of seed and dust that comes out of the bottom of the machine.

Before our seed can be stored or used, it first must be cleaned. That means that the seed is stripped of any sheathes, chaff, stems, leaves or other litter. While it will take several months to clean it all, Kim and I were able to work at the PMC for a week to see how it’s done. Seed cleaning has two parts. First the seed needs to be dislodged from the larger pieces of plant material. Second, the materials need to be separated so that all the viable seed is in one neat pile and the rest is in another.

There are multiple methods for each part and the handling differs for each species. One that we used frequently for more fragile seeds was manual stripping and sorting. With this method, I would shake the seed from the stems and then shake them through a sieve and pan. This works well when the seeds need to be treated gently and for small amounts of seed. However, this method is time intensive and requires extended physical labor.

This is the brush machine that we used to clean seed. This is mainly used for tougher seed that can handle the stiff bristles on the interior brush.

The other method that we used frequently involved the use of brush and air machines. The brush machine is exactly what it sounds like. The main body is a metal cylinder case that houses a spinning paddle of brushes. These brushes fit snuggly against a metal mesh cage that prevents the stems from going through the bottom slot—where the seed goes—and instead pushes the stems through an opening at the other end. An air machine can separate the smaller pieces, mostly seed and broken up dust. This machine brings the mixture into a wind tube. The user controls the air speed so that the dust is blown to the top and collected at the upper end while the heavier, full seed drops to the bottom collection cup.

We used both methods and depending on the seeds, we sometimes mixed the methods together. It was wonderful to learn how to use the machines as well as look at the seeds up close under the microscope. Many thanks to the seed guru, Lubo Mahlev, who guided our time at the PMC lab as well as Jen- a previous CLM intern-, Rob, Kyle, and Todd.

Mining is and has been a major industry in Alaska. Minerals continue to be the 2^nd largest export of the Alaskan economy (1). While there are several different resources taken from Alaskan soil, this post focuses on gold. In 2013, roughly 300 placer mines exported 100,000 ounces of gold (1). Placer mines work similar to gold panning except on a larger scale. The miners dig to where an ancient streambed is buried, excavate the rock and sort it by size, and then extract the gold. You can see the old tailings, or mounds of churned gravel, resulting from this practice along creeks in interior Alaska.

Taken on the rocky stream bank at an old gold mine site in the White Mountains. Because of the difficulty in reaching sites and the time required to complete an AIM assessment, we would sometimes camp out at our sites, like this one, to reduce travel time.

If a placer mine is to operate on BLM owned land, there are some restrictions. First, only so many acres can be open to mining at any given time. Second, after mining activity is done, the miner is responsible for restoration of the disturbed area. Third, restored areas have to be approved by the BLM as restored before those acres are released from bondage, AKA the quota for open and disturbed acres. This last point means that the BLM has to approve the restoration before the miner can open new areas for exploration and extraction.

However, until this year, there wasn’t a set standard protocol for measuring whether a site was restored or not, nor an exact definition of what it meant for an area to be restored. This year, based on talks with various groups including mining communities and BLM scientists, the BLM is testing the AIM protocol as a method for measuring these sites and adapting the protocol from its use as a range tool in the lower 48 to better fit the conditions of Alaskan mines.

To be approved as restored, an area must have: 1. 70% vegetative cover 2. Meet certain species diversity requirements for different functional groups (woody, grass, forb, etc.). The presence of invasive species counts against vegetative cover. This is to incentivize miners to use native vegetation rather than non-native or invasive mixes in their restoration efforts. These goals are evaluated through the use of transects, point intercepts, quadrats, and species inventory.

The view of our first mine site that we evaluated using AIM this season. The settling pond is on the left.

What’s great about AIM is that it gives managers and miners a quantitative method for determining whether or not a site can be released. It also fosters interagency cooperation as not only do BLM field scientists participate, but also NRCS soil scientists join in to characterize soils in both disturbed and reference sites. The downside is that these mines are fairly remote. Many are off road, requiring ATVs to reach the site. Some require helicopters to drop off people and supplies as it’s impossible to reach even on ATVs. Because of these transportation difficulties, it’s expensive in both time and resources to visit these mines. AIM itself is also labor and time intensive, which adds to the cost of visiting the mines.

My fellow CLM intern and I went on a couple of AIM trips to evaluate these mines. While the mines can be hard to reach, the quantitative basis of the AIM protocol results in data that can be used to track regional health and succession over time. While there are some sites that don’t appear to be recovering, some sites are. The main difference seems to be in whether the miners re-spread the fines or organic matter over the disturbed site. If that happens, there’s a better chance of successful recovery because it’s very hard to grow tundra or boreal forest in gravel. I’m optimistic about the potential for the AIM protocol to act as an archival dataset for these disturbed regions and to better inform land management decisions.

References

(1) Resource Development Council. Alaska’s Mining Industry. http://www.akrdc.org/mining accessed 8/24/2016.

In late July, I had the opportunity to attend a soils conference hosted by the NRCS (National Resource Conservation Service) and University of Alaska Fairbanks. The presentations varied from policy, regulations, and research, but every presentation focused on permafrost. Technically, permafrost is any soil that is frozen solid continuously for 2 or more years, but there’s so much more to it. There’s stable permafrost, which is much deeper and less likely to thaw. On top of it lies an active layer that is more likely to thaw, changing in depth year to year given the range of air temperatures.

This native Alaskan orchid was found in calcareous soils associated with the frost boils of Sukakpak Mountain.

Within this active layer, a variety of land formations can develop including ice wedges, pingos, and sorted circles. These unique landforms often create a diverse set of microclimates that can support a more diverse plant community. Ice wedges start to grow when rapidly cooling air temperatures crack the ground, allowing snowmelt to enter in the spring and freeze in the winter. Over time, these cycle grows the wedge and pushes soil up and out of the way. At some point, the wedge starts to die. This dying wedge can be the source for a seep, leaving a depression in the ground when it’s completely gone.

Pingos or frost boils result from ice pooling and building underground, pushing the above soil into a dome. Once the soil cracks, all the insulation is gone and the ice melts away. This cracking can be explosive. Local folktales include people building houses or cabins on small hills only to have the house forcefully ejected as the hill implodes. Finally, sorted circles come from the repeated freeze-thaw cycle pushing rocks up to the surface and sorting them by size. However, what all permafrost seems to have in common is a high silt and organic content in a matrix of ice.

A frost boil at Sukakpak Mountain surrounded by wetland in calcareous soils.

As a part of the conference, we were allowed to visit the permafrost tunnel in Fairbanks to see some of these formations in real life. Imagine a dusty tunnel that smells like an old attic at about 31 degrees F with evenly spaced work lights. Hanging from the ceiling is a veil of tangled, fibrous roots of long dead plants. That’s essentially what the permafrost tunnel is like, except in the dusty walls and ceiling you can also see giant blocks and lens of murky black ice. This particular tunnel was built to better understand how to mine in the permafrost. Since it’s construction, it’s now used to study the permafrost itself and the creatures it has encapsulated. For example, one outcropping of plants is an ancient overturned riverbank. The plants were preserved so quickly that they’re still green if you shine a light on them. Steppe bison and woolly mammoth remains are routinely excavated. Towards the deepest end of the shaft is a branch carbon dated to 46,000 years old!

A look down the Permafrost Tunnel in Fairbanks, Alaska. The tunnel is maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The permafrost is a dynamic soil type, but climate change is accelerating and intensifying that dynamic beyond the norm. As Alaska broke its hottest day of the year record this summer, the permafrost has been receding, the active layer encroaching into areas that have historically been more stable. This has some major implications for life in Alaska. When water melts from permafrost, that silty organic mix is a perfect recipe for quicksand, meaning more buildings and roads being swallowed underground and greater dangers of mudslides like this one in Denali National Park. It means greater deterioration of hunting trails that Native Alaskans rely heavily on for subsistence and traditional practices. It also means a greater acceleration of climate change.

Remember that 46,000-year-old branch? The reason it hasn’t decayed is because it’s surrounded by ice. Remove the ice and it’ll start to decompose, along with all the other organic matter in the permafrost. Because it’s deep underground where there’s no oxygen, that decomposition will create methane, which can and does bubble to the surface and escape to the atmosphere. It’s already happening as demonstrated by these scientists. The tundra will go from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Some predictions even show the tundra shifting to a grassland ecosystem if warming continues. Climate change is real and during a summer of record heat and rainfall, it’s quite noticeable here in Alaska.

Want to learn more about permafrost? There’s a new documentary coming out in 2017 specifically on Alaskan permafrost dynamics. Check out the trailer for Between Earth and Sky here.

Being in Alaska with the Bureau of Land Management, I get a lot of questions about what I do. In truth, I do a lot of different tasks. As a part of my job, I work with other organizations such as the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Natural Heritage Program, the Anchorage Botanic Garden, and the Plant Materials Center in Palmer. This week, I’m at the Plant Materials Center (PMC for short), weeding the fields of native plants and prepping a greenhouse to withstand an onslaught of summertime insects.

Pioneer Peak in Palmer, Alaska overlooks the work done at the Plant Materials Center

The PMC receives wild collected native seeds, cleans and stores it, and then grows fields of needed species. This ensures that commercial growers receive enough seed to make a full crop, which can then be used for restoration operations. There simply isn’t enough wild seed to supply the demand of restoration efforts around mining operations and after wildfires. By growing the seed that Seeds of Success collects, much more seed is produced that can then jumpstart larger scale production.

A field of native plants grown from wild seed collections by the Bureau of Land Management

I have been removing dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum) from in between the rows of natives in one such field. The biggest issue with the weeds is that they can contaminate the native seed. As we collect the native seed, it’s possible to accidently pick up some of the weed seed, leading to a lot of issues with the cleaning and then use of that collection. There’s nothing quite as horrifying as seeding for native species and getting dandelions instead.

I’ve really enjoyed what time I’ve gotten to spend out at the PMC. Not only is the work engaging and worthwhile, the people are welcoming and generous. I feel extremely lucky to have this opportunity of working here. There’s also picturesque mountains in the background, which only adds to the experience.

Anchorage, Alaska Field Office, Bureau of Land Management