Life up north has been progressing quite wonderfully.  After a week getting friendly with the gold miners on the Fortymile river and a June and July full of record breaking rain (http://www.alaskapublic.org/2014/07/11/fairbanks-rains-approach-record-levels/), August has arrived bringing with it some dryness (hallelujah!) and color.  While the lower 48 is still solidly in summer, leaves are beginning to change up here: aspen leaves turning bright yellow, fireweed red and dwarf birch an alarming shade of highlighter orange.

Fall is coming…

In my last post I mentioned starting on a post-fire community monitoring project in Nome Creek.  This plan was put to action a few weeks ago by myself, Jim (wildlife biologist) and a fellow intern, Emily.  Jim, Emily and I drove to Nome Creek, arriving too late to complete a site that night.  Plus it was raining (ok maybe August hasn’t been THAT dry).  Instead we took a short stroll behind the field station to practice plant ID and test out our rain gear.  Jim had a solid knowledge of different mosses and lichens as he often works with caribou.  This is something I have not had much experience with, so I am looking forward to getting better at moss and lichen ID as this project progresses.  The 30+ bags Jim has of just ‘common’ mosses that look exactly alike is not an encouraging sign, however.

The next morning we navigated to two different sites in the Nome Creek area.  The first was ¼ mile from the road.  This seems close but tussocks, hummocks and sphagnum considered, it took quite a while to navigate to the site using GPS.  Once there we had to locate the part of the area that was actually surveyed by British students back in 2001 with only 2 grainy disposable camera pictures to aid us.  Keep in mind these sites burned in 2004 so we were often looking a rather different scene.  We eventually matched up ridgelines, clumps of dirt and the charred remains of trees and laid down a transect along what we hoped was close to the original transect.  For the first site, Jim walked us through the protocol: recording extensive site information, doing a point intercept transect, collecting soil samples, estimating caribou browse, denoting burn severity, measuring amount of organic matter burned, counting saplings, taking photos and installing site markers so that these sites can be more easily found in the future and used for long term ecological studies.  Our current goal for the data is to investigate levels of spruce regeneration among plots and analyze how this relates to burn severity, pre-fire amounts of organic matter, site soil moisture and amount of organic matter burned.  Jim (and others) have noted that often sites that were previously spruce forest will regenerate after particularly severe fires as deciduous dominant forests (or simply shrublands), see: http://www.firescience.gov/projects/briefs/05-1-2-06_FSBrief10.pdf

All said and done, surveying one site took upwards of four hours.  Quite the procedure.

Emily and I visited more sights after Jim departed, noticing low spruce regeneration on all.  I am excited to collect more data and see where this project goes.  As summer is coming to an end, data collection will have to resume next May.  I’ve just received word that I will be staying in Fairbanks through next May and hopefully into the field season so with any luck I will be able to follow this project along and collect data next summer.

Transect line ready at top of Nome Creek Tabletop Mountain Trail

Some Populus tremuloides regeneration

Odd fungus found at Nome Creek Campground. Any fungus nerds out there that know what this is?

Other exciting August happenings include a second trip to Denali National Park to meet up with some fellow Tar Heels who came up to visit and backpack through the backcountry, and a trip to central Alaska’s beloved bird inspired towns: Chicken and Eagle.

Teklinika River, Denali National Park

Hiking in Denali’s trail-less wilderness backcountry

My supervisor Ruth and I conducted NISIMS surveys (for invasive plants) on the way to and around Chicken and Eagle and attended National Public Lands Day in Eagle.  The weather was perfect for National Public Lands Day—crisp fall air, clear skies, cool temperatures, abundant sunlight—and Eagle is an adorable little town.  Eagle residents, BLM employees and more gathered to celebrate public lands.  A knowledgeable local resident led young-uns and others on a nature walk, the local history expert conducted a tour of the abandoned military fort (Ft. Egbert) established in 1899, children collected pressed and displayed leaves, a Ketchikan artist led a workshop on loop weaving, BLM employees grilled burgers and dogs, root beer floats were served and a good time was had by all.  The whole scene brought me back to autumn in the Midwest with its abundance outdoor activities, festivals, crafts and food.  My favorite season by far.  Around a fire later that evening I learned more about the residents of Eagle—many of them live a subsistence lifestyle meaning they hunt and gather for all their food (save perhaps one Fairbanks Fred Meyer run per year for non-perishables).  As such they are incredibly knowledgeable about flora, fauna, weather, soil, water etc. of the surrounding area and completely in tune with the environment.  It was quite impressive.  The fact that they depend so much on the land also means that the stakes are high.  A failed caribou hunt can mean a hungry family–no grocery store to run to for supplemental food (nearest decent grocery store is in Fairbanks, 6 hours away).  Each family that lives this way knows exactly how many caribou they need to make it through the winter, so changes in the environment that disturb or change the migration patterns of caribou have dire consequences for them.