Team Shrub Represents at BES

December 22, 2022December 23, 2022 | teamshrub

‘Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the planet,
Not a university was stirring, not even a hamlet;

The posters were hung on the poster boards with care,
In hopes that ecologists soon would be there;

The PhD students were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of statistical models danced in their heads;

‘Twas the BES Conference, at the end of the year,
This was the conference to bring ecological cheer,

What a week it was – I can tell from the posts,
And for those of us who missed it, we feel it the most,

But the ecology remains, for those that are keen,
In this humble blog post, for all to be seen.

And I hear you exclaim, ere I sit down to write —
“Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night!”
Isla adapts a classic poem

The British Ecological Society Conference has wrapped in Edinburgh and Team Shrub (if not me) was there! Here are some of the photos of the action so that you too can join from afar, if you didn’t make it to BES 2022 yourself.

That’s a wrap!#BES2022 is now officially over, but all of our recorded sessions & ePresentations will be available for a further 3 months on Whova 🤩

Thank you to everyone who made this our best Annual Meeting yet, we can’t wait to see you all next year in Belfast for #BES2023 pic.twitter.com/UwY26B7lxO
— British Ecological Society (@BritishEcolSoc) December 21, 2022

Team Shrub attended BES in style this year with presentations by postdoc Mariana García Criado and PhD student Joseph Everest and former lab member Schmidt Fellow Gergana Daskalova and posters by PhD student Elise Gallois and MSc by research students Erica Zaja and Jiri Subrt. Here is a rundown of the different Team Shrub contributions, so you can catch up.

‘Plant diversity dynamics across temporal and spatial scales in a warming Arctic‘ by Mariana García Criado

Co-authors: Mariana García Criado (University of Edinburgh), Isla Myers-Smith (University of Edinburgh), Anne Bjorkman (University of Gothenburg), Sarah Elmendorf (University of Colorado Boulder), Signe Normand (Aarhus University)

The Arctic is experiencing unprecedented warming rates, and plant communities are responding through abundance, phenology and distribution shifts. However, biodiversity spatial patterns and its direction of change over time remain unquantified. Using a database with 37,452 records of vascular plant composition from 1,327 plots across four decades, we explore how multiple biodiversity axes vary across space and time. We found that Arctic species richness decreases as latitude increases, but overall species richness has not changed over time. Species trajectories were related to climate, with warmer and drier areas experiencing fewer local extinctions. Plant community abundance change was pronounced, and increasing shrub dominance corresponded with extinctions and reduced diversity. However, Arctic plant communities have not homogenized, and are more resilient when they have a diverse and even composition. Overall, our results suggest limited biodiversity change, but indicate early signs of directional biotic changes that could result in Arctic biodiversity tipping points.

‘Paws for thought: Impact of dog yards on tundra greening in Svalbard‘ by Elise Gallois

Co-authors: Elise Gallois (University of Edinburgh), Jesamine Bartlett (NINA), Kristine Bakke Westergaard (NTNU), Logan Berner (Northern Arizona University)

Dog-sledding in High Arctic Svalbard is a key tourist attraction, and pony trekking and the keeping of livestock is also in practice in the central areas of the archipelago. Animal husbandry waste disposal practises – particularly those involving the disposal of animal faeces – hugely enrich soils with excess nutrients. Here, we utilise NDVI (normalised difference vegetation index) analysis to explore the impact of both abandoned and contemporary animal husbandry on Svalbard’s tundra. We found that while peak-season greenness was increasing across all of our study sites, the greening signal was enhanced at active dog-yards and historic animal husbandry sites. Across sites, the date of tundra greening has shifted earlier, and the date of plant senescence has shifted slightly later between 1986-2021. Our results suggest an immediate positive impact of nutrient enrichment from animal husbandry on tundra productivity, and a lasting impact of nutrient enrichment at abandoned animal husbandry sites.

This poster comes with it’s own Spotify Playlist – check it out and listen along!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Rmq52EPg3JH2JcH3r7RGb

‘Shrubification not climate is the main driver of tundra functional diversity across space and time‘ by Joseph Everest’

Co-authors: Joseph Everest (University of Edinburgh), Isla Myers-Smith (University of Edinburgh), Anne Bjorkman (University of Gothenburg), Sarah Elmendorf (University of Colorado Boulder), Mariana García Criado (University of Edinburgh)

A tundra-wide vegetation regime shift is underway in response to accelerating Arctic warming. Greening and browning, phenological shifts and functional trait change are relatively well documented, however resulting impacts on ecosystem function remain unclear. Functional diversity encompasses the range, variability and evenness of key functional traits and captures responses in tundra processes and ecosystem functions. We analysed biogeographic patterns and change over time in tundra plant functional diversity across sites over decades of change. We found that trends in species richness and its dominant drivers are not mirrored in functional diversity metrics. Instead, spatial and temporal patterns in plant functional diversity are controlled by the dominance of different functional groups within plots and the variation in key functional traits, such as plant height. Our results suggest that continued tundra compositional change (e.g., shrubification) with warming will drive changes to ecosystem functions despite slower rates of change in tundra plant biodiversity.

‘How will shrub expansion reshape caribou habitat?’ by Erica Zaja

Co-authors: Erica Zaja (University of Edinburgh), Isla Myers-Smith (University of Edinburgh), Mariana García Criado (University of Edinburgh)

The Arctic is warming three to four times faster than the global average, altering vegetation communities and the timing of lifecycle events. Shrubs are encroaching into wildlife habitats, altering forage quantity, quality, and temporal availability. I used linear models to investigate whether shrub biomass was related to summer temperature and precipitation, and linear mixed effects models to study the change in timing of shrub leaf emergence in the Porcupine Caribou Herd’s (PCH) (Rangifer tarandus granti) Alaskan summer range. I showed that shrub biomass was greater in warmer and wetter areas, and that the timing of leaf emergence advanced in one out of four sites within the range. These findings suggest that climate change might further increase shrub encroachment and advance the timing of shrub green-up within the caribou summer range. This study can inform caribou habitat conservation and contribute to the protection of Indigenous livelihoods depending on the PCH.

‘Human depopulation has stronger impacts on plant biodiversity in lowland versus mountain villages‘ by Gergana Daskalova

Co-authors: Gergana Daskalova (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA), Piero Visconti (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA), Volker Radeloff (University of Wisconsin-Madison), K. Vassilev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), B. Genova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), M. Nazarov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)

Rural populations around the world have nearly halved in the last century, leaving behind abandoned land with unknown consequences for biodiversity. Focusing on Bulgaria, the quickest depopulating country in the world, we quantified plant biodiversity across 120 sites and 30 villages along a human depopulation gradient. In lowland areas, depopulating villages supported higher plant richness than those with increasing human populations. In montane regions, species richness was similar across fully abandoned villages and villages with decreasing or stable human presence. We found lower species richness in villages that had been abandoned further in the past. In both lowlands and mountains, villages with stable human presence had distinct plant species composition from that of depopulating villages. The heterogeneous ecological fingerprint of human depopulation needs to be incorporated in biodiversity scenarios to capture both the benefits and threats that land abandonment poses for biodiversity.

‘Is tundra community composition change driven by increases in species with warmer thermal niches?‘ by Jiri Subrt

Co-authors: Jiri Subrt (University of Edinburgh), Isla Myers-Smith (University of Edinburgh)

Arctic is experiencing rapid warming, impacting vegetation communities. Thermophilisation, the increase of warm-loving species in response to warming was detected across the Arctic. There is heterogeneity in site-specific responses to warming and uncertainty on whether vegetation responds primarily to warming. I studied thermophilisation and vegetation changes on Qikiqtaruk Island, Canada. I analysed vegetation composition data and calculated how plant community temperatures changed from 1999 to 2019. My results indicate that plant communities exhibit a signal of vegetation cover change in response to warming and species that have increased more relative to others are not always the most thermophilic. My findings suggest that warming is likely not the only predictor of vegetation changes in tundra. My findings also highlight that vegetation responses are heterogeneous, influenced by local environmental factors, and may experience lags. This study emphasises the importance of long-term monitoring of the Arctic to predict the response of vegetation to warming.

Storytelling with Data – Data visualisation meets graphic design to tell scientific stories

Members of Team Shrub lead a Coding Club workshop on Data Visualisation. It looks like it was a very successful workshop, though the team does look exhausted by the end!

Our workshop is for anyone wanting to amplify their data visualisation skills to tell powerful scientific stories. Through individual and team activities and tutorials, we will take participants from figure conceptualisation and graphic design to the weaving of stories and the R code to make it all happen.

If you want to complete this workshop in your own time, you can follow along at the Coding Club website:

https://ourcodingclub.github.io/tutorials/dataviz-storytelling/

Team Shrub also met up with our ArcticHub colleagues Jonathan von Oppen from Aarhus University and Laura Turner from the University of Nottingham.

Team Shrub co-supervised PhD student Megan Stamp won a Tucan Print from the Royal Society publishing! Erica and Elise drew their research and are now planning on switching careers to become visual artists.

Shenanigans seem to have been had by all across the week. I wish I’d been there! Here’s to a relaxing holidays and to future conferences in 2023.

Words by Isla and photos by all of the peeps on Twitter!

Willow – Part 3 of A Trilogy

December 12, 2022December 12, 2022 | teamshrub

A Canadian field season: my experience, reflections and preliminary project results

By Erica Zaja

Figure 1. Erica downloading data from a TOMST logger on the Kluane Plateau in August 2022. Picture by Calum Hoad.

This summer, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to fieldwork in the Yukon Territory (Canada) under the supervision of Prof. Isla Myers-Smith. As Team Shrub’s research assistant, my job was to help the PhD students with their projects’ data collection. The PhD students in the lab are studying a variety of topics including above and below ground plant phenology, functional diversity across elevational gradients and drivers of greening captured through satellite data.

I was delighted to be part of the field team. It was also my very first time travelling outside of Europe and seeing such incredible landscapes, colossal mountain peaks and vast lakes on Northern Canada. It was amazing to finally see the plants and landscapes that I had read about for my undergraduate dissertation project focused on Arctic vegetation dynamics. In the field, I was given the opportunity to carry out my own independent research project and collect my own data. My project was based in the common garden experiment (Figure 2, Figure 3 ; see previous blogposts Willow and Willow-a sequel), set up by Isla in 2013 by Kluane Lake (Figure 2), which was my home for the whole summer.

Figure 2. On the left: map of study sites in the Yukon Territory, Canada: Kluane Plateau (purple pin) and Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island (green pin). On the right: zoomed-in map showing Kluane Plateau (purple pin) and Common Garden site (red pin). Maps made using Google My Maps 2022.

The common garden experiment

Common garden experiments are plantings of species collected from different geographical sites and grown together under shared conditions. In Kluane, the goal of the common garden experiment is to test for genetic differentiation in growth form of tundra willows (Salix spp.) across climate and latitudinal gradients. The common garden experiment is designed to better understand the balance between genetic and environmental drivers of tundra shrubification. The underlying research question that the common garden is trying to answer is one about adaptation:

Are tundra shrubs genetically adapted to their local environment – thus limiting future vegetation change as shrubs expand their ranges northward – or do environmental factors drive the ‘plasticity’ in shrub growth?

Figure 3. The common garden experiment from above and Kluane Lake in the background. Picture by Iain Myers-Smith.

In particular, the purpose of the experiment is to assess the growth of three different widespread tundra willow species: Arctic willow – Salix arctica (Pall.), Diamond Leaf willow – Salix pulchra (Cham.) and Richard’s willow – Salix richardsonii (Hook.) (Figure 4) from Arctic and alpine source populations, under warmer temperature conditions. From 2013 – 2017, Arctic shrubs from Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island (70°N) and alpine shrubs from the Kluane Plateau (61°N) – referred to as source populations – were transplanted into the warmer, common environment of the garden within the boreal forest. The boreal forest site, where the common garden is located, has an average summer temperature of 14°C, which is approximately 3-5°C warmer than the source population sites with summer temperatures ranging from 0°C to 12°C (Figure 5).

Figure 4a. *Salix arctica* on Kluane Plateau by Jiri Subrt.

Figure 5. Daily mean surface (a) and soil (b) temperature (°C) for the three sites over the 2022 summer season (June-July-August) showing differences in temperatures. Common garden in orange, Kluane Plateau in purple and Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island in green. Data from TOMST loggers that I installed and collected from the end of the summer 2022 field season.

Project aims and data collection

The common garden experiment has been ongoing since 2013, with shrub growth and phenology monitoring happening every summer season for nine years as of this summer. My project’s aim was to continue the long-term monitoring of the common garden and to collect data from shrubs in alpine and Arctic source populations to compare to growth in the garden. Comparing the growth of shrubs in the common garden with the growth of shrubs in their respective source populations enables us to understand how the different shrub species respond when moved to a warmer environment. This comparison is allowing us to infer whether shrubs are showing strong genetic differentiation or whether they are responding to the local environmental conditions, with important implications for future climate-driven vegetation change.

Over the summer, I went to the common garden on a weekly basis and collected growth measurements including canopy height (cm), shrub width (cm), leaf length (mm) and stem elongation (mm). I also recorded shrub phenology – timing of lifecycle events including timing of green up, yellowing of leaves, leaf shed and full senescence. To sample the growth of shrubs from the alpine source population I hiked up the steep trail of the Kluane Plateau and tagged individuals of the three target Salix species, collecting growth measurements on a weekly basis as well. The round trip on the mountain was ~13km and a 1000m elevation gain – which on a weekly basis (and 16 times in total over summer) was a great fitness workout! Finally, to sample the growth and monitor phenology of shrubs from the Arctic source population I designed a protocol for the other half of Team Shrub to follow to collect data on Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island. At the end of the summer, I also downloaded the phenology pictures taken by time-lapse cameras over winter and summer 2022 and the environmental data (soil moisture and soil, air and surface temperature) recorded by TOMST loggers (Figure 6).

Figure 6. TOMST logger surrounded by *Salix arctica* by the peak of the Kluane Plateau. Picture by Calum Hoad.

Preliminary results

Now, I am back in Edinburgh and I am working on data wrangling, data analysis and writing of main findings. I have been adding the data that I collected this summer to the long-term nine-year monitoring dataset of the common garden. So far, through these analyses we have found that:

Growth traits including canopy height, leaf length and annual stem elongation show strong plastic responses to warming for the tall willows (Salix pulchra and Salix richardsonii), but not for dwarf willow Salix arctica (Figure 7).
Willows from Kluane (southern population) show greater trait changes (canopy height change, leaf length and stem elongation increase) than willows from Qikiqtaruk (northern population) under warmer conditions (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Canopy height (a), leaf length (b) and annual stem elongation (c) differ between alpine (purple) and Arctic (green) shrubs in the common garden over nine years. Lines are generalised linear mixed models and 95% confidence intervals. Colours indicate different shrub source populations: purple for Kluane and green for Qikiqtaruk (Sample size = 260 individuals).

When comparing data from the common garden with source population data, we find that:

Shrubs at source populations are taller and have larger leaves than Salix pulchra and Salix richardsonii – but not Salix arctica – in the common garden (Figure 8).
There is no difference between stem elongation values in the common garden and in source populations for any of the target shrub species (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Differences in canopy height (a), leaf length (b), stem elongation (c) between alpine (purple) and Arctic (green) shrubs in the common garden, compared to data from source populations. Kluane source population in faded purple and Qikiqtaruk source population in faded green. Boxplot showing mean values from data I collected over summer 2022 (Sample size = 127 individuals).

Implications of findings

Overall, preliminary findings indicate that tundra shrubs grow rapidly under warmer conditions, but alpine shrubs (southern population) respond at a faster pace than Arctic shrubs (northern population). These findings suggest that there might be strong genetic differences between populations that constrain trait changes as response to warming, although willows do demonstrate high plasticity potential to warmer growing conditions. In summary, these preliminary results suggest that local adaptation may constrain tundra shrub growth responses to future warming, especially at northern sites, and that we should expect rapid – but not uniform – shrub encroachment with future warming across the tundra.

Next steps

Explore maternal effects to understand differences in canopy heights. Do taller parent shrubs (shrubs from source populations from which cuttings were taken and transplanted to the common garden) produce taller offspring in the common garden?
Process phenocam pictures and compare timing of different phenophases between common garden and source populations. Do northern willows senesce earlier than southern willows, being adapted to a shorter growing season?
Explore environmental drivers of shrub growth and phenology. Do warmer temperatures and wetter conditions favour shrub growth and alter the timing of phenophases?

What this field season has taught me

This summer has taught me really important scientific skills and lessons that I will benefit from throughout my career. Meeting First Nations Peoples and communities and learning about their lands, plants, wildlife and culture was the highlight of my summer. I learnt how to identify many of the native plant species of the region, I practiced field sampling techniques and I met interesting researchers working on a variety of different topics from glaciology to pika habitat conservation. Having the opportunity to spend so long in a place so far from my own home and experience is something I will always be grateful for. The three most important things this field season has made me value more are:

Living in close contact with nature
The beauty of tundra plants and boreal forests
My luck as an early career ecologist to be able to travel to such amazing places

Figure 9a. The view of Kluane Lake from the Kluane Plateau. Picture by Jiri Subrt.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Kluane First Nation, Champagne and Aishihik First Nations for allowing us to work on their lands. Thank you to all the people that worked so hard over the years to set up and maintain the common garden experiment, including Gergana Daskalova and Mariana García Criado. Thank you to this summer’s field team (Calum Hoad, Diana Jerome, Joseph Everest and Jiri Subrt) for helping me collect the data in the common garden and on the Kluane Plateau. Thank you to this summer’s Arctic team (Elise Gallois, Madelaine Anderson, Clara Surprenant, Zabrina Leslie) for collecting data on Qikiqtaruk.

Team shrub – together yet apart

July 12, 2022July 12, 2022 | teamshrub

It’s been about a week since Team Shrub has split up into two teams: the Kluane Crew and the Arctic Crew. The former has stayed at Kluane, while the latter is now in Inuvik, awaiting their departure to Qikiqtaruk island on the Yukon Arctic Coast. In this blog post, you can read about our adventures since we parted ways.

The thing that ties our separate team adventures together are charter flights, some people got to take them and others of us are still waiting… and waiting… (photo credit: Erica Zaja)

The Adventures of the Kluane Crew

by Erica, Jiri, Calum, Diana and Joe

Since we parted ways with the other half of Team Shrub, we’ve been having a blast. We have reached new heights in the icefields, graduated our degrees on the shores of Kluane Lake, flown our drones over the rapidly melting snow and discovered new-to-us tundra plant species. Read about our goings on in Kluane in the first half of this blog post.

Flight to the Icefields

The prop plane (Helio Courier) that took us to the icefields. (photo credit: Erica Zaja)

Living close to the Silver City Airstrip seemed too good to be true. When we found out there was the possibility of flying over the St. Elias Icefields with Icefield Discovery, we jumped at the opportunity – literally! Having never been on a prop plane, we were nervous but also incredibly excited. Meeting the amazing pilots Raphael and Kensuke, and having the safety brief made us feel a lot better.

The take off was incredibly smooth, more than many commercial flights! The views from the air were incredible. First, we flew over Kluane Lake, then we passed the glaciers over the majestic mountains of the Kluane National Park. Throughout the flight, our pilots told us all about the landscape, pointing out landmarks and scouting for sheep on the mountain slopes. The landing was bumpy – as one would expect when landing on a glacier – but very fun!

Once on the top of the icefields, excitement levels skyrocketed! It was all so incredibly bright. All we could see was snow, extending over the horizon to the mountains. It was an unexpectedly warm and comfortable temperature. Touching the snow was such an incredible feeling – crystalline ice! We ran, jumped, and frolicked in the frozen landscape. It felt like being on top of the world!

Erica jumping on the icefields. (photo credit: Jiri Suburt)

Being in the icefields made us want to explore the mountains around us further and made us feel incredibly grateful to be living in such a stunning place all summer. Once back at the field station, the experience almost felt unreal – did we really fly to the largest non-polar ice field in the world? It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime moment that the Kluane Crew will never forget!

Erica and Jiri having a celebratory run on the glacier! (photo credit: Kensuke, Pilot)

Flying drones on the KLUANE Plateau

The prize for the project that requires the heaviest equipment goes to… Calum and his drone surveys! Yes, going up to the Kluane Plateau with drones has been quite challenging! On a typical day we start walking by Kluane Lake, continue through the boreal forest, pass treeline, then shrubline, and suddenly we are in the tundra! The Kluane Plateau – or The Plateau as we like to call it – is where most of our current data collection takes place. Calum and Joe are our drone experts here at Kluane, and we can definitely say that they are doing a great job! Though one question remains, will we ever get used to hiking 1000 m up the very steep trail?

Pre-plateau poses by members of the Kluane Crew. (photo credit: Calum Hoad and Jiri Subrt for the photo of Calum)

Graduating by Kluane Lake

The Team Shrub field assistants Jiri and Erica have recently completed their BSc degrees in Ecological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Unfortunately, being in the field for the summer meant that they could not attend their official graduation ceremony in Scotland. The amazing Kluane Team did not want them to miss out on such a milestone! After luring Jiri and Erica on a “team walk to the lake”, Calum, Joe, and Diana surprised the two field assistants with a bottle of champagne hidden in a pond close to the Lake.

The surprises didn’t end there! Our “crafty stitcher”, Diana, put together some graduation gowns made of black mesh and Joe wrote pretend diplomas tied up in flagging tape. Fieldwork equipment really comes to loads of uses! Luckily, Jiri and Erica never leave the station without their sun caps, which came in handy for the classic graduation hat toss! After a few glasses of champagne with a lovely view over the lake at sunset, the graduation ceremony came to an end, with some very happy field assistants.

Erica and Jiri throw their caps in the air. (photo credit: Joe Everest)

Luckily, Jiri and Erica never leave the station without their sun caps, which came in handy for the classic graduation hat toss! After a few glasses of champagne with a lovely view over the lake at sunset, the graduation ceremony came to an end, with some very happy field assistants!

Plant hunting!

One of our goals for this summer was to get to know the diversity of plants around Kluane and to be able to confidently identify them in the field. After all, plant ID is an essential fieldwork skill! Taking pictures of plants in the field and identifying them back at the station has become the new fun activity within our team. That’s field life! Until now, we have identified more than 50 species! Our field assistant, Jiri, has created a beautifully detailed collection of plant pictures, along with their scientific names and main characteristics. We cannot wait to use this resource when trying to identify plants in the field! With more than six weeks left in the field… will we surpass one hundred plant species?

Quick tundra ecology quiz: Can you identify these majestic tundra plants? (photo credit: Jiri Subrt)

So that sums up the adventures of the past week or so. What other adventures does Kluane have in store for us this summer? Only time will tell.

The Kaskawulsh Glacier from our flight to the icefields. (Photo credit: Erica Zaja)

The Adventures of the Arctic Crew

By Clara, Madi, Elise, Zabrina and Isla

The Arctic Crew of Team Shrub departed the Kluane Region and travelled via Whitehorse across the Arctic Circle to our new temporary home of Inuvik. We thought we would be here for just a few days, but a week later, we are still in town and waiting to catch our much awaited charter flight to Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island on the Arctic Coast of the Yukon. Read about our adventures as we pack and do logistics in the searing heat of summer in the land of the midnight sun during a “heat dome”.

The smoke from wildfires coves the Yukon as we saw on the flight to Inuvik. (photo credit: Isla Myers-Smith)

The Heat Dome – the hottest place in Canada at 32C

“Travel to the Arctic!”, they said. “It’ll be cold!”, they said. We’re not so sure…. As soon as we stepped off the plane as it landed at Inuvik airport, we were met with a wall of tropical humid air, and we had to check to make sure we hadn’t accidentally boarded a plane to Mexico instead of the Canadian Arctic.

Sure enough, we arrived in Inuvik during a heat wave. More precisely, a heat ‘dome’. This is a meteorological feature that occurs when high pressure is trapped over a region by the jet stream, meaning the areas below experience baking hot conditions for days on end. This northern heatwave has apparently been breaking records in the Yukon and Northwest Territories this week, reaching a high of 32°C on the 7th of July.

Not fantastic news for the Arctic crew who packed our thermal long johns and puffer down jackets in preparation for island life! To cope, we’ve been visiting ice cream shops and taking luxuriant swims in the local ‘airport lake’.

Logistics in Inuvik

“Where is the sharpie?”, “Has anyone got the duct tape?”, “Did we take a photo of that box before we fastened the cable ties?”. This has been the soundscape of our work in the Aurora Research Institute loading dock this week as the Arctic team has been busy packing and re-packing cargo ready to fly out to the island later in the week. We’ve all been getting buff hoisting boxes around between the storage cage and the weighing scales – but don’t worry, we’ve been treating ourselves with much needed ice cream floats and BBQ food!

We’ve also been busy zipping between the handful of shops in Inuvik buying essential groceries, important hardware, and the most precious and rare cargo of all, lactose-free milk (Madi) and gluten-free bread (Elise). This has been an action-packed week defined by sweltering temperatures and multiple spreadsheet tabs, but we’ll appreciate all our hard work when we get to the island with all of our scientific gear, food, and luggage in tow – that is if we don’t forget anything!

The Aklak Hanger (photo credit: Isla Myers-Smith)

Music jams and Research convos in Inuvik

One of the great things about visiting the Aurora Research Station is meeting other researchers from different institutes around the world: University of Alberta, University of Victoria and the Alfred Wegener Institute, amongst others. The heatwave has been absolutely perfect for BBQs out in front of the row houses; between roasted halloumi and hot dogs, we’ve been able to fill up and chat with fellow researchers about the science behind their research. Our shared housing situation has also allowed us to meet our wonderful roommate from whom we’ve learned about greenhouses and food security up in the North.

After dinner, it never took too long for the guitar, fiddle and ukulele to be taken out of their cases and tuned for a little jam session between the musical members of each team. With guitar, viola, mandolin and ukulele, we have enough instruments to form a band! But do we have the required musical talents? Maybe not, but have a listen to the music jam in Inuvik in the following audio clip. We’ll practice on the island!

A clip of a row house music jam with Trevor from UVic and Isla in Inuvik.

Off to Qikiqtaruk

Now, by the end of the week, we are approaching the point of no return. Our charter flight was scheduled for Sunday at 10am. But Sunday has come and gone and now so has Monday too. When will we fly? Time feels in standstill as we wait each day for the call to rush to the airport with the last of our bags and all of our frozen food.

Once we board that Twin Otter, we’ll leave the connectivity of Inuvik and head off to Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island. The ice is breaking up with creaking and cracking along the Arctic Coast of the Yukon and the plants are whistling in the wind and calling us over. Listen closely to see if you can hear from afar! We’re crossing our fingers for good weather and hoping the fog stays at bay, allowing us a safe flight over with a great view.

The sea ice conditions on Wednesday the 6th of July 2022 on Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island from the Sentinel 2 satellites (Sentinel EO browser)

Monday update…the fog has not stayed at bay. We are still here in Inuvik, but for how much longer??? Only time and the pilots will tell. Fortunately there is still one ice cream shop to check out (soft serve!), but the temperature is plummeting making ice cream less appealing for some perhaps, but not for us!

The circumpolar map on the floor of the Inuvik airport allows us to chart our locations on either side of the Yukon Territory. (photo credit: Isla Myers-Smith)

Two crews 1000 kms apart. Even though our adventures may take us in different directions, Team Shrub is still together!

Words and photos by Team Shrub

The Team Shrub remote field season

August 27, 2020August 31, 2020 | teamshrub

This year is a year unlike any other. In 2020, our best laid plans of fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic were overturned by a global pandemic. Field scientists around the world had to halt their field programs, creating gaps in decades-long datasets. But safety first, along with beauty and fun, is the Team Shrub motto and the safety of the northern communities in which we work is paramount, so we have decided to plan an entirely new type of field season – a remote one. The pandemic has brought us working from home, online lab meetings, online talks and conferences, can we also have a remote field season? Can we address our field research goals (or some of them) from our existing data and anything being collected by satellites in the summer of 2020? With this blog post, we will share our Team Shrub 2020 remote field season.

The new mode of conducting collaborative remote field research involves weekly lab meetings online rather than 24 hours together in a tiny cabin in the Arctic.

As the Robbie Burn’s poem states: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley” (translation: “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”). In 2020, funded through a NERC UK – Canada collaboration bursary with the Canadian Airborne Biodiversity Observatory project and Canadian and international partners, we were going to set out to test how microclimate influences plant productivity, phenology and biodiversity patterns across the landscape. But when the field plans were put on hold until 2021, we went back to the drawing board to ask which of our research questions we could still ask with our existing data and satellite remote sensing. During our remote field season, still funded by the NERC Arctic Office, we have a number of research goals summarised in the following research questions.

How do the following vary with microclimate in tundra ecosystems?

Plant productivity – the tundra greenness derived from multipspectral drone data
Plant phenology – the timing of leaf out, flowering and yellowing of leaves
Spectral diversity – the variation in the light spectra reflected off of the land surface

Mapping tundra microclimates

Tundra plant responses to warming are influenced by the local climate conditions in which plants grow. Research to-date indicates that warmer and wetter microclimates are experiencing more vegetation change. If microclimate is a major driver of tundra plant responses to warming, we will need additional landscape-level information to make accurate future projections of Arctic vegetation change. Since we can’t get to the field in person, by compiling our existing data including temperature, active layer, soil moisture, phenocam, shrubrings, decomposition and drone data we can still tackle these questions. PhD student Elise’s research will address these questions in collaboration with the rest of Team Shrub and our other collaborators such as Anne, Gerte and Jeff. Perhaps, we can answer some of the mysteries of microclimate with our existing data and new analyses during our remote field season.

This somewhat psychedelic image is the microclimate of tundra plants. Using drone imagery, Elise is estimating the microclimate for tundra plants on Qikiqtaruk using the Microclima package. South-facing slopes are warming and lower ground is usually wetter. But, how does this variation influence the growth of tundra plants?

Gauging tundra greening

Last summer through the Greening Arctic project, we mapped island-scale tundra greenness using drones and the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment project airborne data collection. Now we can compare the greenness derived from satellites with tundra microclimates to understand what controls where the greenest parts of the landscape are and how that greenness is captured by sensors on drones, planes and satellites across spatial scales. The remote field season team and Jeff and our collaborators through the High Latitude Drone Ecology Network project are working to answer this very question with our data from our field site on Qikiqtaruk on the Arctic coast of the Yukon and other locations around the Arctic.

Flying drones across the tundra in 2019 to map out tundra greenness across the landscape. (photo credit: Gergana Daskalova)

Inspecting the tundra hyperspectrally

Our research goals for the field season of 2020 were to conduct the main Arctic field season of the CABO project. We were going to capture tundra vegetation from leaves to landscapes using hyperspectral data. That field work will move to 2021 (we hope), but luckily through the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) project flights in 2019 and some preliminary data collection from 2018 and 2019, we can begin to explore how hyperspectral data relate to tundra microclimates and plant biodiversity. This work will form the basis of future Team Shrub research by our starting PhD students in 2020 and through collaborations with the High Latitude Drone Ecology Network, CABO and NASA ABoVE projects. We are hoping that our remote field season will provide a head start on the data collection in 2021.

The flight lines for the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment data collection on Qikiqtaruk in 2019. With these and on the ground data we can begin to explore how tundra plant communities and biodiversity can be detected using hyperspectral data beyond what is visible to the naked eye.

Photographing tundra phenology

From 2016 to 2019 – and hopefully also in 2020 if the batteries last and the muskox behave – we have been setting out time-lapse cameras across the landscape to capture plant phenology. These so-called phenocams provide a high temporal resolution record of the day-to-day and even hour-to-hour changes of plants. We can measure the exact moment that a bud bursts, a flower opens or the tips of the leaves turn yellow each summer giving us a really precise picture of how tundra plants grow across the two-month long Arctic summers. During our remote field season, Joe and Maude have been going through the accumulated phenocam data identifying each moment that the plants leaf out, flower and senesce over time. We can then test how the plant phenology is influenced by the microclimates in which the plants grow, to help us to better understand phenology change with climate warming. Will a bear or muskox show up in the previous years’ phenocam data? – it looks like they have!

Meet the remote field team

Our remote field season will be led by first year PhD student Elise and Team Shrub field assistants Shawn and Maude, Isla is on standby to help with logistics, Team Shrub alumni Joe and external collaborator Ali have signed up as well for our virtual trip to the Arctic Coast of the Yukon through data. Some participants even get to go to a field site in Arctic Sweden this summer such as co-supervised PhD student Gerte! Our remote field season crew has been trying to live the life of the field ecologists from our pandemic locations. As Joe says: “dress for the job you want, not the job you have”. And clearly based on our dress, we would rather be off in the Arctic doing fieldwork!

Joe measuring tundra plant phenology remotely using time-lapse camera data from his kitchen table – I guess it can be quite cold even indoors during the Scottish summer.

Elise gearing up to quantify tundra microclimates remotely using drone data, measure the growth on her house plants and capture below-ground plant productivity in the Swedish Arctic – hopefully the mosquitoes aren’t that bad in her Edinburgh kitchen!

Isla chasing comets, tracking the local wildlife and of course spending too much time in front of a computer screen (not pictured).

In August, through quarantines and perseverance, Isla actually made it north to the Yukon. Not as far as Qikiqtaruk and our Arctic site, but on a visit to the Outpost Research Station in the Kluane Region of the Southern Yukon. There she visited the seven-year long common garden experiment where we are exploring the limits of growth of tundra willows when released from their cold tundra environments into the much warmer Boreal forest. This year has been a rainy and cool summer in the Southern Yukon, unlike the Arctic heatwave in Siberia, which is very much to the taste of the tundra willows, and they have continued to grow beyond expectations. In just seven years, some shrubs are over two metres in diameter and over half a metre tall. Other shrubs are just eking out an existence Arctic-style by keeping their annual growth to a minimum. From the air you can see the variation in growth among these Arctic and alpine willows. In the remote field season, we can compile all seven years of data and begin to write up our results of how tundra shrubs might be expected to respond as the Arctic warms up to temperatures beyond the current day conditions. Thanks to Amaya, Judy and Iain for help with the data collection!

The common garden in 2020 with Isla waving for scale. Some of those shrubs are turning into monsters in the oldest beds of the garden planted in 2013. How big will they get? Only time will tell. (photo credit: Iain Myers-Smith)

This summer, the Team Shrub adventures are a bit different than in the past. But we’ll keep you posted on our research progress and regale you with stories of a remote field season. With far fewer mosquitoes and maybe more sedentary research adventures, we hope the research achievements will be just as exciting! Stay tuned to hear about our 2020 remote field season findings.

If you want to hear more about our research and our remote field season plans check out this podcast!
Arctic Adaptation – An Interview With Dr. Isla Myers-Smith

If you want to read more about our recent drone research check out this article published this week!
Drones Help Bridge the Gaps in Assessing Global Change

Team Shrub hosts Real Scientists

May 10, 2020 | teamshrub

This week Team Shrub is doing our first social media takeover. We’ll be hosting Real Scientists on Twitter!

To read about our three primary tweeters this week, check out the Real Scientists blog post.

Here are some quotes from the post:

Real Scientists is diving into the fascinating world of northern ecosystems with Team Shrub! That’s right — we have THREE scientists on deck this week! Team Shrub (@TeamShrub) is the lab of Dr Isla Myers-Smith (@IslaHMS), Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. She’s joined by PhD students Gergana Daskalova (@gndaskalova) and Elise Gallois (@e_gallois).

A bit about the three of us from the post:

Welcome to Real Scientists! How did you get started in science?

Isla Myers-Smith: My parents were ecologists, so you could argue that ecology is the family business. My parents have always been my most important scientific mentors. Even though my own career has led me in new directions, whether it was counting tent caterpillars or finding sparrow nests, my parents provided the foundation and inspiration for my own scientific career.

My love of the Arctic was first inspired by a family trip to the Yukon and time spent on the tundra when I lived in Alaska. There is something magical about the lands beyond the treeline that has always captured my imagination. Being up North and watching sometimes dramatic change play out before my eyes has captured my scientific curiosity. In my research, I want to figure out how tundra ecosystems are changing as the climate warms so that we can better predict the future of our planet.

What does your work involve, and where does it take you?

Gergana Daskalova: Way back in sixth grade, a friend of mine said she saw a woodpecker over the weekend. I got intrigued and read a bit about woodpeckers, went to visit my grandpa in the countryside hoping to spot one, and then kept returning to the village for the birds, the nature and the garden. In ninth grade looking through a guide of uni degrees, I stopped at E — for Ecology — and didn’t look any further.

I am a global change ecologist — my work focuses on how the variety of life on Earth — the planet’s biodiversity — is being altered by land-use change, climate change, land abandonment and other types of environmental shifts. In my work, I harness the power of the recorded observations of hundreds of scientists and volunteers to find the answer to the question — how does global change influence biodiversity? From forest cover change around the world to climate warming in the Arctic and more, I am studying how the world’s ecosystems and the millions of species they support are changing over time.

What keeps you motivated and what do you want the public to know about your work?

Elise Gallois: The Arctic is warming at a much faster rate than the global average, and this warming is triggering potentially huge landscape changes including widespread accelerated plant growth. While this sounds like a ‘good news story’, these changes have the potential to further alter the climate system even more as a greener Arctic will absorb more of the sun’s heat. I think the public should care about these processes because what happens in the Arctic does not necessarily stay in the Arctic, and also because the tundra ecosystem is really cool and misunderstood!

I love writing and performing stand up comedy! I’ve recently started performing ‘science comedy’ — stand up sets about my research. I believe that communication is a core skill for all scientists, and that where possible, scientists have a duty to disseminate their research to multiple audiences in order to educate, inform decision making, and inspire change — especially within fields as pressing and as pervasive as climate warming and global ecosystem change. As such, I dedicate time to pursuing different forms and media of outreach.

This week on Real Scientists, we’ll tell you a bit about our research about how ecosystems and different plants and animals respond to global change in the Arctic and all around the world. We’ll share with you some of our scientific findings, fieldwork adventures, the joys of analysing data, our collaborative approach to science, our lives as scientists and maybe a bit about being a scientist under lockdown.

The plan is: Today – Intro to the team, Monday – The greening Arctic, Tuesday – Global biodiversity change, Wednesday – Diversity in data science, Thursday – Scientific storytelling, Friday – Fieldwork adventures and Saturday – Ecology in a changing world.

Let us know if you have any questions or topics you want us to cover this week! Looking forward to sharing our science.

Here’s hoping our social media take over is a success!

by Isla, Gergana and Elise

Weathered in

September 7, 2019September 8, 2019 | teamshrub

Weather can alter the best laid plans when doing Arctic fieldwork. Our final days on Qikiqtaruk did not go according to plan. But then I never feel ready to leave the Arctic anyways. I relished the extra days that we had on the island and the adventures that ensued. Here is my account of being weathered in for almost a week at our Arctic field site. To check out Gergana’s take on those very same final days, see her blog post here.

The end of the field season is always a strange time – a limbo between Arctic fieldwork and the return to the rest of your life. You have your list of goals for the summer that are mostly ticked off. But there is still a mad rush to get the last things done. You say to yourself, “this is the last time I will walk around the spit” or “this will be the last sauna”. This summer the last sauna was definitely not the last as we had quite a few extra days added on to our field season.

Day 41

The day we were scheduled to leave Qikiqtaruk the storm clouds were moving in. Rain had already arrived in Inuvik and due to the bad weather our charter plane couldn’t pick us up. We unpacked our personal bags and settled in for the night.

We saw the newly arrived polar bear across the cove. We first spotted the bear a few days back. This was my first sighting of a polar bear in the wild, despite working in the Arctic for over 10 years and in Polar bear country on Svalbard, Ellesmere, Churchill and here on Qikiqtaruk. The bears have been around me, it is just I have never seen them with my own eyes before. So it was quite the excitement at the first sighting!

Unlike most polar bears, this particular bear was actually not particularly white because it was covered in mud from the permafrost thaw slumps along the coast. We named him Slumpy. He (we thought it was a he) hunkered down across the bay to sleep through the storms. Later on, I spotted a grizzly bear roaming around the ridge near where the polar bear was curled up out of the wind. The two species of bears came within 100 m of each other, but seem to ignore one another. Spotting the two species of bears in the same terrain is an uncommon occurrence – though the two species have been found upon occasion to interbreed.

Bear_print — Polar bear foot prints on the beach around camp.

Day 42

The winds picked up and it started to rain. Near gale-force winds were predicted. We weren’t going to be flying today. Time to bring in more wood for the wood stove and to bake some cookies. We had eaten the same dinner for two or was it three nights in a row now – sun-dried tomato pasta – hard to beat! There was an evening game of cards planned – an intense game called Snert.

Ravens playing in the wind above the tent shelters.

Day 43

Today, the winds reached near gale force. That meant no plane again. Instead, more time by the fire. More cooking and cleaning. There were boxes to inventory and more organising to do. Trips to the outhouse were exciting with the wind ripping the door out of your hands. The buildings moan and groan in the wind. The stove pipes rattled. The polar bear was still across the bay hunkered down in the terrible weather. But, we were cosy warm by the wood stove.

August_storms — The wind and waves of the constant storm that kept us weathered in for days.

Day 44

Rain and winds again. It was hard to concentrate on much of anything not knowing what the future could hold. Will we fly tomorrow or not? Will we be here for days? Whittling wood, crafts and cooking were the best ways to pass the time. I got out my watercolour paints. There were still some data and camera cards to back up. The bags were still mostly packed. And we were unsure how much to unpack. We could be leaving at any time if the weather improved.

A bowhead whale in Pauline Cove in the darkness of the stormy rains.

In the afternoon, we heard that there were bowhead whales in the bay! We rushed out into the horizontal rain trying to keep our cameras dry. There were at least four bowheads close to shore by the sauna swimming back and forth and feeding in the shallows. They were so close you felt you could reach out and touch them. We wonder could they see us through the water? It was too cold to stay out for long, so we did rotations by the fire before heading out again to commune with the whales.

In the evening, we heard a message on the handheld radios. “Polar bear coming to camp”. We grabbed our cameras and threw on our warm clothes and stood outside our building watching from a safe distance. Sure enough along the beach beyond the runway Slumpy was slowly approaching. The rangers scared off the bear after we got a pretty good view from our buildings.

Polar_bear_painting — Slumpy the polar bear and a distant bowhead painted by Isla Myers-Smith.

Day 45

The weather had improved a bit, but there was still some low cloud, rain and fog. Others were more optimistic, but I didn’t think we were flying today. The Community Building became a hair salon for those wanting a trim or style. The sauna was on for everyone to get cleaned up before our returns to town. The polar bear had wandered off. The bowheads were gone. We all went for walks around the spit for fresh air and to stave off cabin fever.

In the evening, we looked out the window. Snowflakes the size of ping pong balls were falling from the sky. We rushed out to see first-hand and to catch snowflakes on our tongues. Soon there was enough snow on the ground for a few snowballs and a bit of a snowball fight. How white would it be when we woke up tomorrow? Only time would tell.

Bone_house_snow — Qikiqtaruk in greys and whites with the fresh dusting of snow.

Day 46

I woke up early to a two-inch blanket of snow across the island. Everything was white including the fog all around. The winds had died down. Qikiqtaruk was a winter wonderland. I walked around camp to enjoy this view of the island that I don’t usually get, but I stayed close to the buildings. Slumpy would blend in much better in this world of white! With the snow and the fog, the plane was unlikely to come right away, so I went back to bed.

The next time I woke things were brighter. The fog had cleared. The snow was melting. The weather might now be flyable! Then we got word, the plane was on the way. We were the second flight, but it was still time to kick into high gear and get our stuff re-packed and out to the runway. We also needed to clean, sweep and mop again. We shifted from being on hold to action mode.

Twin_otter — The plane finally arriving means it is time for us to be leaving the Arctic.

The first plane arrived. We thought to ourselves, we might actually leave on today – our sixth day of being weathered in. The pilot warned us to tell him over InReach if the fog returned or if it started to snow, but instead over the next hours the clouds cleared. We had time to put the drones in the air one last time to capture the island dusted in snow and the first glimpses of sun for over a week. Then finally, we heard the sound of the returning Twin Otter and saw the plane in the distance.

This was our final day on the island. We saw the once verdant green Arctic turn from autumnal yellows and browns to white with snow. The beginning of winter had returned to the Arctic just as we were headed south – the end of the field season.

Words, photos and video by Isla Myers-Smith

The Arctic at a second glance

August 9, 2019September 8, 2019 | teamshrub

Arctic landscapes are so vast, it is easy to miss the details at a first glance. In the windows of historic buildings or the flat calm water of the Arctic ocean, reflections provide unexpected perspectives on this place. This summer, I have returned to Qikiqtaruk to explore the hidden diversity of plants and how this diversity is being altered as the climate continues to warm. I am here in the Arctic to take that closer second look. To see the Arctic through the lens of my own experience.

Beyond the first glance

At a first glance, the Arctic is impressive and grand. Vast landscapes, sea ice shimmering in the sun and then disappearing into a fog as the winds turns the ocean from a perfect calm to an mighty storm. And across the land and sea – unique ecosystems that support some of the planet’s most iconic biodiversity – beluga whales, polar bears, caribou, muskox and more. At a second glance, however, you can look beyond the charismatic wildlife and vast landscapes, it is then that you spot the diversity underlying everything.

In June, sea ice surrounds Qikiqtaruk. Once the winds calm down and the sun lowers in the horizon at 69° latitude everything is doubled in reflections. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

A hidden Arctic

This summer, I have returned to Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island, a Territorial Park in the Yukon in Canada. During my previous visits, I was lucky to have the chance to soak in the Arctic in all its grandeur – the comings and goings of the sea ice, the midnight sun bathing the tundra in hours of golden light, the caribou and the polar bears. Now, I am here to look up closer and discover what remains hidden across the tundra landscape. What is the biodiversity that has escaped the sights of scientists for decades? How is Qikiqtaruk seen through the eyes of the people that have lived here for centuries and those who, like me, are fortunate to visit? Just as the winds are shifting directions and the weather is turning once again on Qikiqtaruk, I will also shift my perspective – this time to some of the tundra’s stories that only come into focus if you go beyond quick impressions and first glances.

Shifting winds from the Southeast to the Northwest marked the onset of the windiest storm of the season so far. With 50-mile-per-hour winds holding us back in camp, the storm gave us time for contemplation of our trip so far. Photo by Isla Myers-Smith.

An unexpected diversity

At a first glance, the Arctic alternates between shades of white and green. For most of the year, white shades span land and sea as far as the eye can see. Clouds and fog make it hard to tell where land ends and sky begins. Then in summer, the tundra comes to life. Willows and other shrubs like my favourite dwarf willow with the melodic Latin name of Betula nana leaf out and cover the landscape in shades of green. Amidst the green, however, a second glance reveals numerous other plant species in a multitude of colours – grasses, forbs, lichens and mosses, bringing diversity to the sea of green. This is an unexpected diversity for a place with such a harsh climate. It is this more hidden diversity that I seek to uncover.

Shapes, colours and textures intermingle on the tundra floor, making for a vibrant palette one can easily miss from afar. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

An unexpected passion for plants

I never expected to be fascinated by Arctic plants. My first forays into nature revolved, perhaps predictably, around birds. Woodpeckers, to be specific. At the age of 11, I wanted to see as many woodpeckers as possible and hatched a complex plan to lure them into my grandparents’ garden with pig fat smeared on the bark of an old walnut tree. Though the woodpeckers were never that interested in the pig fat and our neighbors interpreted the actions as some sort of witchcraft, I didn’t give up. Eventually, I got to see many woodpeckers, and other birds too.

My love for Arctic plants is a more recent acquisition. On 22nd of June 2017, as I first stepped of the plane on Qikiqtaruk it was the blue forget-me-nots flowering around camp that first caught my eye. Unlike with birds, we know much less about the tundra’s plant communities. Plants are among the first to respond to environmental change, such as the rapid warming currently unfolding across the tundra biome. Yet, most tundra plants are far from conspicuous, making it hard to capture the full picture of exactly how climate change is reshaping the Arctic.

Standing just mere centimeters above the ground, the snow-bed willow (*Salix polaris*) is one of the Arctic’s species that are easily missed at a first glance across these tundra landscapes. Photo: Gergana Daskalova.

A botanist’s toolkit

When it comes to discovering plants, there are some tools that have remained a constant part of the explorer’s toolkit over the centuries. The first tool is the quadrat – a square frame often one by one meter in size. Throw it (or rather place it gently) across as many sites as possible, record all plants that fall within the frame, their abundance, height, life stage and more, and you get a detailed snapshot of Arctic plants. Do that at the same sites over time, and you can track change. Are certain species becoming more dominant whilst others are dwindling and perhaps even disappearing all together?

The second tool is much less bulky to pack but takes longer to develop – a pair of observant eyes, trained to notice subtle details about different species. Walk across the tundra, for hours, for miles, for as long as you can, record every plant that you see along the way, perhaps collect a few specimens for a herbarium record – a pressed plant specimen for museum collections – and you get a wider picture of plant communities. The area you cover is greater, but because you have to keep going, you can’t do the detailed measurements you’d do if you focused on a specific quadrat. This summer, I am combining the age-old tools of plant discovery but also bringing in drones to capture as much of the landscape as possible and provide the environmental context for biodiversity change observations on Qikiqtaruk.

Collecting herbarium specimens, even of species I have encountered often over the years, can reveal some surprises for me. Here, my surprise comes from below ground. Digging out a specimen of the bistort (*Polygonum bistorta*) reveals to me that this species forms bulbs. Photo by Isla Myers-Smith.

A tundra full of surprises

I’ve been on Qikiqtaruk for just over two weeks now. Though it is still too early for the biodiversity monitoring to begin, we’re waiting for peak biomass! I have been scanning the ground and looking for plants on our hikes. There is a sense of comfort in knowing the name of each plant that crosses your path – like catching up with old friends. But I did also wonder – will I get to see a plant species here I’ve never encountered before?

Day by day I was rediscovering many of the plants I had observed on my previous visits to Qikiqtaruk, but none that I hadn’t seen before. And then, just as I was filming a colourful carpet of tundra flowers, I noticed a plant swaying in the wind not quite like all the others around it. With large white bell-shaped flowers and pointed pairs of leaves, this was a species whose name I could not think of on the spot. A species that I hadn’t seen before.

Knowing that I am still discovering new species, after I have already spent many days looking for plants, makes me think – how many more species lurk across the landscape, escaping our sight? And what kind of species are they? Do the species that are part of the part of the plant communities here, but haven’t been recorded inside our long-term quadrats over almost 20 years of monitoring have anything in common? And what can this so called “dark diversity” tell us about how Arctic ecosystems are changing if we shine the spotlight on it?

This time, tundra surprises came in the form of a delicate yellow flower – *Cerastium maximum*. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

A time for reflection

Here on Qikiqtaruk life pulsates to a rhythm of its own. Our schedules are packed with work at both ends of the day – capturing the peak light of the day when flying drones and the low angled light of the night for photography. Life here rarely rests – an island beyond time. But when the wind, fog and rain disrupt the best laid plans, there is time to reflect. I have been thinking more and more about what emerges when you pause, listen, and observe carefully. When you don’t turn away after the first glance but keep on looking.

The Pauline Cove settlement on Qikiqtaruk is a place perfect for reflections – both literally and figuratively. Calm waters and sunny days bend the light, creating almost perfect reflections, like this one in the window of the island’s workshop. And when the winds pick up and the rain and fog return, we can pause to reflect. Photo: Gergana Daskalova.

Words by Gergana Daskalova

An island beyond time

July 30, 2019November 23, 2019 | teamshrub

Qikiqtaruk is an island beyond time. The mix of heritage, long human history and the modern day all collide in one place under the midnight sun, moving its inhabitants to a time zone all of their own.

Pauline Cove seen from a drone’s camera. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

“Are we meeting at 8:30 pm Yukon Time or 8:30 pm Inuvik time? I think they said Yukon Time. But it is 8:30 now! No, it isn’t, it is 7:30. Yes, but that is 7:30 Mountain Time. Wait, no it isn’t. What time zone is this iPad in? It is 8:30 Pacific Time after all. That means we’re late!”

These are the types of conversations you have when you live on an island existing in at least two time zones. Officially we are in the Yukon and thus in the Pacific Time Zone. But all of our logistics come through Inuvik, so it makes more sense to keep to Inuvik time as that is when the planes land. The Yukon Government sticks to the official time and the rest of us generally are on Inuvik time – if it suits us.

Rainbow — Two of Canada’s time zones are represented here, and one that goes beyond traditional time. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

We’ve noticed this year that our smart phones and iPads have gotten smarter. They reset the time back to Pacific when we set them manually to Mountain, contributing to the time zone confusions. But then this is the Arctic – the land of midnight sun and 24-hour daylight. So schedules tend to be somewhat fluid anyways.

Mornings on Qikiqtaruk are long drawn out events. When does morning even begin? It is hard to say and usually we are sleeping through the transition as the sun climbs higher in the Eastern part of the sky. Morning for us at the moment is when sun pours into the windows of the East side of Signals house making it hard to keep your eyes closed for much longer.

Solar noon comes around at 2 pm (Inuvik Time) so that is when you want drones in the air if you are collecting multispectral data. That means getting up at the crack of 9:30 am and getting bags ready and lunches packed by 11:00 am for flights to begin by 12:00 pm – Inuvik time that is.

Luke launching the Parrot DISCO while judging the wind. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

The afternoon is a long fade from midday to evening. By 5:00 pm the light is getting a bit low for multispectral data collection, but for RGB work, the light is still fine, so there might be time to hike over to the slump or head over to the coast for some additional flights.

The sun is getting low in the sky by 8:00 or 9:00 pm or so and if it was a sunny day, that means golden light angling out of the clouds with rays hitting the horizon. This starts the period when the light is great for photography. A last drone flight with video to capture the site, or photos as you walk home to camp are an end to the work day.

Looking out towards Colinson Head. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

By 11:00 pm or so the magical hours are approaching. The golden light is now bathing the land and often the seas have stilled to a flat calm. Now the Arctic is achingly beautiful everywhere you look. Sandpipers and plovers run around the ponds, baby eider ducks splash in the waves, and if you are lucky, a fox walks the beach or a pod of belugas swim by. From midnight until 4:00 am the Arctic is at its daily best and the photographer can’t rest just yet.

Sunset reflections on Pauline Cove. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

By 4:00 to 5:00 am the sun is starting to rise again in the sky. And the promise of good drone weather the next day sends the last stragglers to bed. When the wake up is at 9:30 am, that means a short night of sleep, but often the morning weather check indicates conditions no good for drone flying – too windy, too foggy, to rainy, so then you get to blissfully sleep in.

Semipalmated Plover and chick. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

The schedule that one adapts to when out here is affectionately known as Herschel Time – when you follow the light and the weather and don’t stick to the 9 to 5 and 24-hour day. As I write this blog post an hour from the solar minimum and ponder the other things I want to accomplish this evening before I head to bed “early”, I know I am now adjusted to the schedule of this place.

Words by Isla and photos by Gergana

Blowing in the wind

July 28, 2019September 8, 2019 | teamshrub

The Yukon flag flaps East, then North, then West, then back to North – with the shifting winds likely signifying a storm on the way. What will the looming clouds to the west bring? It could be all sorts of different weather as our last week on the island has taught us. Weather dictates life as a field researcher in the Arctic. Our fates are tied to the winds.

Gergana1_0Y7A5381 — The gale arrives as the wind whips the flag first East then West and up to 75 km/h the second of multiple storms we have experienced over the last week. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

We have recently experienced almost all possible weather conditions over the span of just a few days. From hot sun and still air, to a thunderstorm and hail pelting the island, to gale-force winds, to white-out fog, to rain and back to sun. The weather continues to be unpredictable making it hard to plan our fieldwork. Each night we go to bed wondering what weather we will wake up to the next morning.

Weather #1: The lightning storm The day was hot for the Arctic. It could have been as warm as 18ºC. So hot we were in t-shirts, and the air was still and oppressive. These are rare conditions when the breeze usually has a chill to it. We were back at camp after being out that day and the sky was turning to sort of grey-ish yellow in the distance to the West. Then we heard our first thunder clap. We ran outside to get a better view with GoPros and cameras in tow. Across the island to the North of us a show played out of arcing lightning crisscrossing the sky punctuated by booming claps of thunder.

Once the darkest clouds reached us, we began to be pelted with a mix of hail and rain, soon getting quite wet! The lightning strikes appeared from a distance to be making landfall – though likely they were not. Could the tundra of Qikiqtaruk burn, we wondered as we watched. Large tundra fires have been observed in this region of the world. In 2007, the Anaktuvuk River fire burned 1039 km²of tundra on Alaska’s North Slope just a few hundred kilometers from Qikiqtaruk. From charcoal records, we know that the tundra burned more frequently in the past during warmer periods of the Holocene. But a fire was not lit that evening on the Qikiqtaruk tundra.

Gergana2_screenshot — A frame from our GoPro Fusion video of lightning arcing in the sky and reflected in the still calm waters of the pond in front of the Sauna as the electrical storm arrives. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

Weather #2: The Gale The following day, all of our weather sources were alerting us. The rangers said there was wind on the way. I got an InReach message from my brother telling us to stay safe, and the weather reports said gale-force winds. The winds were already well past breezy and white-capped waves were crashing on the shores to the East. But that evening at around 8pm the winds switched suddenly from East to West. The chimney started thrumming and the windows started rattling – the storm had arrived.

0Y7A0458 — Waves crash against first the Eastern shores and then the West as the winds pick up in advance of the gale. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

As the winds grew stronger and stronger, we headed out into them to experience the wildness around camp. With waterproof GoPro Fusions in hand we headed off to the beach where the waves were crashing onto shore sending spray high into the air. The waves were making it over the beach in places, flooding pools around camp and splashing into the buildings close to shore. The brave Eider duck families were still out there riding the waves trying to find a bit of shelter in the wind. It was time to retreat indoors when Gergana got drenched by a wave in the face.

Gergana4_0Y7A1225 — A family of Eider ducks splash in the waves seeking shelter during the gale. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

Weather #3: The fog Next morning we woke up, not to devastation, but to the fallen stairs of one of the outhouses and our mostly empty water barrel blown over. The high winds of the previous day had been replaced by a calm wetness. Though the clouds came and went, fog blew in from across the cove, blanketing the camp in white. The fog has a certain peace to it, particularly fog after storms. But this marked yet another day without data collection. And the wet weather left a feeling of being trapped in camp. Our bags were packed and ready to head out drone flying, but we were grounded yet again by the weather.

Gergana5_0Y7A5187 — The fog descends on Pauline Cove on the third day of stormy weather. Photo by Gergana Daskalova.

We had lost track of time during the period of storminess and changeable weather. Finally, three or it could have been four days after we last were out of camp, the skies cleared and the winds dropped and we were able to return to data collection. Five flights of multispectral data to capture tundra greenness and one trip to a distant permafrost slump to explore and map with our drones. Yay! The satisfaction of full day out in the field and data to back up on our return. But the good weather was short lived! As the winds are back and so are we are yet again stuck back at camp.

Words by Isla Myers-Smith, photos by Gergana Daskalova