This week for TeamShrub Lab meeting we did Isla’s intro workshop to piping in R. I discovered piping nearly a year ago and it has changed my coding life! No more nested loops for me, well maybe not quite as many. I am still on my way to learning all the functionality of dplyr, but in case you haven’t discovered the wonders of piping and dplyr here are a few useful links.
Today Jakob and I joined Tom Wade, head of the Airborne GeoSciences Facility to teach about drone ecology (or should it be “dronecology”) – the science of using drones to test ecological questions – in Caroline Nichol’s Current Issues course.
Jakob describes how to pilot a multicopter drone.
Tom gave a lecture on the platforms that can be used for airborne GeoSciences including planes and drones (manned and unmanned systems) of different sizes and the data that they can collect. Then Jakob and I gave a lecture on the developing field of drone ecology and what ecological research questions drones can help answer with a focus on our Arctic drone research on what is driving the observed tundra greening patterns.
Best Scientific Question – Understanding movement patterns of the elephant shrew in relation to predation under the grass canopy using aerial heat-sensing photography or video (RATS project).
Best Conservation Project – Using fixed-wing drones to monitor deforestation using slash and burn techniques and measuring the impacts of this biomass burning on black carbon emissions (“Who Are We?” project).
Best Use of Novel Drone Technology – The amphibious drone for collecting above- and below-the-water-surface imagery of coral reefs to estimate productivity changes over time (Coral Conservation project). – With an additional shout out to the StarFish project that had designed an aquatic drone to pierce invasive starfish as a form of invasive species management!
Then we got to explore the flying of drones using flight simulators, to see how the research drones work in person and to test out flying a toy-size drone for ourselves.
Flying a drone on a flight simulator!
I think students and lecturers alike got enthused by both the fun and scientific potential for the emerging field of drone ecology!
If there is anything that springs to mind at the word ‘tundra’, it is probably something cold.
Not always it turns out. And definitely not in Australia.
The Australian Alps in summer
Qiqiktaruk in winter
Spot the difference between Australia and my usual field site in December
This December I found myself, somewhat to my surprise, burying tea bags at the top of the Australian Alps. This arose almost entirely due to the enthusiasm and generosity of Susanna Venn, one of the tundra tea bag experiment team members based at Australia National University. Though of course, no trip to anywhere is complete without fitting in a little research!
We set out on the long drive to the mountains with an enviable research team spread out across the three cars. Two university researchers, three PhD students, two Honours students, two very enthusiastic boys and 150 tea bags.
Although perhaps a little unexpected given the thirty-something degree heat, the Alps were indeed very similar to the tundra environments I was more used to working in. Low shrubs, grasses and alpine flowers, their whites and yellows just beginning to fade. Snow patch communities emerging from recently melted snows. Frost hollows marking out a very different landscape from the recovering snow gums lining the slopes below. All in all a perfect environment to test our hypotheses.
The main aim of the tundra tea bag experiment is to see whether variation in decomposition across tundra environments is greater than variation explained by differences in tea type. Where better then, than a completely different site on the other side of the world. Here, summers are longer and hotter (a lot hotter). The vegetation is completely different, so may be soil nutrients, and potentially moisture is a more critical factor to decomposition rate. Time will tell!
An abundance of enthusiasm for burying tea!
After digging in the tea we took the time to do a little exploring, admiring the views and getting more than a little sunburnt, then back to the cabin for a cuppa.
Thanks all involved and I look forward the results!
We are looking for an enthusiastic postdoctoral researcher to join the TeamShrub research group at the University of Edinburgh to explore tundra greening patterns using drone ecology (a.k.a. UAVs or remotely piloted aircraft systems).
This postdoc position will focus on testing the correspondence between remotely-sensed tundra greening and plot-based measures of tundra vegetation change.
The research will involve the coordination of field data collection in the Canadian Arctic and hierarchical modeling of remotely sensed data and large tundra vegetation change datasets in the programming language R, interpreting results and writing manuscripts.
This postdoc position is part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded grant “Climate as a driver of shrub expansion and tundra greening”.
The candidate will be based in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, but also encouraged to engage fully with international collaborators based at institutions across Europe and North America.
This post is full time, fixed term for 24 months and is available from 1st March 2016; or as soon as possible thereafter.
Half way between the field seasons of 2015 an 2016 we’re back in Canada. This time not to conduct research, but for the ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting.
Set in the beautiful backdrop of Isla’s home town Vancouver, we’re meeting many old friends from our past adventures and make new ones, while hearing about the exciting science that is currently done in the Canadian Arctic.
Spanning the whole spectrum from natural to social sciences, the rapidly changing Arctic environment is forming the backbone of the conference.
This year Team Shrub is represented in four ways: Isla and Megan are giving presentations about plant traits and boreal shrub increase; Megan and the Quikiqtaruk Monitoring Team are presenting a poster on the phenology monitoring on Quikiqtaruk – Herschel Island, and Jakob presents a poster on our work linking satellite observed greening to vegetation change on the ground with emergent drone technologies.
Come check out our presentations if you’re in Vancouver, follow the conference on Twitter at #ASM2015 and keep an eye on our blog for the occasional update!
If you have been an ardent follower of our Arctic escapades, you may have picked up on a strange sounding experiment we are carrying out across the tundra: the tundra tea bag experiment!
The view from one of our tea bag sites
This is an international effort looking at how decomposition rates might change in a warming world.
We bury two types of tea (Green and Rooibos) at sites across the tundra biome – the cold environments found in the Arctic or the tops of mountains. After a few months we dig up the tea and look at how much it has decomposed. This helps us understand how rapidly it has broken down – and how fast the carbon and nutrients it contains move into the soils and air.
Burying tea to investigate tundra carbon cycling
Normally when we look at decomposition we have to consider both what it is (how fast does it break down) and where it is (where does it break down fastest). But because all the tea we use is the same, we can be more confident that any differences are due to site conditions. This means we can look at how things like temperature, moisture and vegetation cover affect decomposition – which helps us make predictions about the future.
As the Arctic heats up, all the plant matter stored in cold and frozen soils will start to rot, releasing carbon to the atmosphere and speeding up global warming. This could cause a runaway positive feedback affecting the earth as a whole. The tundra tea bag experiment helps us understand if this will happen, and if so, how fast. It is one of many ways we can look at this, and we are working with scientists around the world – from Alaska to Australia, Sweden to Switzerland – to try to get as much data as we can. Similar experiments are also taking place all around the world, spearheaded by the dECOlab in Urtrecht in the Netherlands (http://www.decolab.org/tbi/).
A huge amount of carbon is stored in the litter and soils of the tundra
And now the first results are now starting to come in! So far we have data for three-month burials from 14 sites, with more expected to come in over the next couple of months (see the map).
Location of tundra tea bag experiment sites
Initial results represent a gradient from European alpine to northern Arctic sites. As expected, there are large variations in decomposition rate (mass loss of tea bags) over the three-month period (see the figure below). This is more pronounced for Green tea than for Rooibos tea. However, the two types of tea display highly distinct decomposition rates despite the range of sites covered, with no overlap in distributions. This supports previous work suggesting that litter characteristics assert more influence over decomposition rate than site characteristics. The initial results are really exciting for our work looking at vegetation change and litter decomposition, as it greatly supports the idea that changes to plant traits and community composition are critical to understanding future rates of decomposition in tundra ecosystems.
Mass loss (%) of green and rooibos tea over three months from 14 sites across the tundra biome
Today was the final day of the Perth Mountain Meeting and after the close of the conference, TeamShrub drove to the hills to summit a mountain and check out the alpine diversity. The peak was so diverse with red deer, grouse, mountain hare, and one of our favourite shrubs Empetrum (crowberry) that we had to jump for joy!
On top of a mountain
It was a great week! TeamShrub was representing with talks by Sandra and Anne and a poster by Haydn. We also met up with friends and collaborators from through out the years, including the crew from the WSL in Davos and my own PhD advisor David Hik.
The major take-home messages of the conference for us were:
Alpine tundra is likely warming and changing just as fast as Arctic tundra, though some factors such as day length, snow conditions, and distance to treeline plant communities differ. Thus, somewhat different future trajectories can be expected for plant communities on the mountainous versus high-latitude sides of the tundra biome.
Microclimate matters. So, if you are a plant, it might be just as easy to move around a mountain rather than just climb towards the summit to follow your thermal niche.
Plant diversity is increasing on alpine summits with warming, but the plants that come and go could just be “summit tourists” and might not be there to stay.
Treeline advance is likely controlled by a variety of factors besides just climate, such as plant competition and herbivory, such that warming won’t always result in trees moving into the tundra.
Check out our tweets for more info on the conference @TeamShrub.
Sandra gave her very first talk at an international conference entitled: “The influence of plant size on the climate sensitivity of tundra shrubs”. She told us all about her analysis of the climate sensitivity of tundra shrubs of different heights. Her hypothesis that taller shrubs are more climate sensitive because they should be better competitors and more linked to atmospheric conditions, was not supported by her analysis of the ShrubHub dataset. This finding leads on beautifully into the rest of her PhD research, where she will explicit test competition and shrub-shrub interactions using dendroecology in tundra ecosystems across the Yukon Territory and Northern Quebec (see details on field data collection in previous blog posts). Sandra did a fabulous job of presenting a complicated analysis on shrubs to an audience of treeline enthusiasts!
It was also an international conference first for Haydn with his poster entitled: “Arctic and alpine tundra vegetation change has no net impact on tundra litter decomposition rates”. Haydn pulled out all the stops putting together a poster that was a work of art, clearly communicated his scientific message, and even included take-away tea bag business cards. Haydn used plant traits to predict community-weighted decomposition. He found that although decomposition is greater at warmer sites around the tundra biome, with warming, plant composition changes. Over time, there is an increase in more decomposable species (e.g., deciduous versus evergreen shrubs) from less decomposable functional groups (e.g., shrubs). Thus, these two effects offset each other leading to no net change in tundra litter decomposition. This is a natural launching off point into other elements of Haydn’s PhD including the tundra teabag experiment initiative that he is leading.
Anne presented the talk: “From the top of the mountain to the top of the world: biogeographic patterns in plant functional traits across the tundra biome”. Anne has found very strong patterns of plant traits along tundra climate gradients. And, what is particularly exciting is that the changes in plant traits across space match up well with the changes in the same traits over time with warming. For example, Anne has looked at the patterns of specific leaf area (SLA), which describes leaf area and mass and is related to energy capture through photosynthesis, water-use efficiency and decomposability of plant leaves. At warmer sites, the community-weighted SLA is higher versus colder sites. And over time with warming, SLA is also increasing across the tundra biome. Anne’s analysis also demonstrates the importance of within versus between species variation in plant traits, such as for example with patterns of canopy height, which need to be incorporated into projections of tundra ecosystem function overtime.
Stay tuned to hear more about the developing manuscripts of these three exciting projects on TeamShrub…
The poster session
Haydn with his poster – check out the tea bags!
Anne presenting tundra trait biogeography
Sandra introducing her talk
The take-home message
Our week began and ended with climbing a mountain, which seems very appropriate for a conference all about mountains and a research team that loves summiting peaks, tundra (or pseudo-tundra like we have here in Scotland) and shrubs like this beautiful bell heather (Erica cinerea)!
By Isla
Heather, my middle name sake, has to be one of my other favourite shrubs
Next week TeamShrub will be attending the Perth Mountain Conference in lovely Perth, Scotland just up north from Edinburgh towards Scotland’s mountains! If you are at the meeting, come check out the following presentations.
In the session “Arctic and alpine: How do alpine regions differ from arctic regions?”:
15-3
From the top of the mountain to the top of the world: biogeographic patterns in plant functional traits across the tundra biome
Anne Bjorkman*1, Isla Myers-Smith2, Sarah Elmendorf3, Nadja Rüger1, Jens Kattge4, sTUNDRA Working Group1 1German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Germany, 2University of Edinburgh, UK, 3NEON Inc., USA, 4Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany
S2
Arctic and alpine tundra vegetation change has no net impact on tundra litter decomposition rates
Haydn Thomas*1, Anne Bjorkman2, Isla Myers-Smith1, Sarah Elmendorf3, Hans Cornelissen4, Daan Blok5, Jens Kattge6, Martin Hallinger7, Gabriela Schaepman-Strub8, Ken Tape9, Martin Wilmking10, sTUNDRA Working Group2 1University of Edinburgh, UK, 2German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, Germany, 3Univerisity of Colorado Boulder, USA, 4VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 5University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 6Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany, 7Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden, 8University of Zurich, Switzerland, 9University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA, 10University of Greifswald, Germany
In the session “Mountain treeline ecotones; threshold dynamics and climatic relationships”:
31-2
The influence of plant size on the climate sensitivity of tundra shrubs
Sandra Angers-Blondin*1, Isla Myers-Smith1, Stéphane Boudreau2, Bruce C. Forbes3, Marc Macias-Fauria4, Noémie Boulanger-Lapointe5, Martin Hallinger6, Ken D. Tape7, Esther Lévesque8, Stef Weijers9, Daan Blok10, Trevor Lantz11, Rasmus Halfdan Jørgensen10, Andrew Trant11, Laura Siegwart Collier12, Luise Hermanutz12, James D. M. Speed13, Agata Buchwal14, Allan Buras6, Martin Wilmking6 1University of Edinburgh, UK, 2Université Laval, Canada, 3University of Lapland, Finland, 4University of Oxford, UK, 5University of British Columbia, Canada, 6Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald, Germany, 7University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA, 8Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada, 9University of Bonn, Germany, 10University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 11University of Victoria, Canada, 12Memorial University, Canada, 13Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, 14Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
For the past 15 years or so, the Herschel Island-Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park Rangers have been collecting ecological monitoring data. This monitoring includes many variables including soil temperature, weather and wildlife sightings, but one of the most focused datasets are three plant phenology transects.
Avens transect with Pauline Cove in the background. Photo by Cameron Eckert.
The Rangers themselves are Inuvialuit from Aklavik and Inuvik. They’re cultural and familial history is the western Arctic and in particular the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. It is their dedication and hard work in collecting the plant phenology data that has made it possible to quantify the ongoing phenological changes as the climate changes on Qikiqtaruk.
Ricky, myself, Isla and Sam. Photo by Cameron Eckert.
The phenology transects include three species, 20 plots per species, and phenology checks every 2-3 days from April to September. Originally setup to fulfill International Tundra Experiment (ITEX) protocols, this dataset has exceeded many others in its detail and duration. Due to the location of many researchers at southern institutions and logistics, there are only a handful of Arctic research programs that monitor plants with this rigour, from green up to senescence.
Isla, Sam and I working on the Avens plots. Photo by Cameron Eckert.
Three species are monitored, and I will make an effort not to list them in biased importance (being on Team Shrub). They are: Dryas integrifolia (Mountain Avens), Salix arctica (Arctic Willow) and Eriophorum vaginatum (Cottongrass). Based on ITEX protocols and adapted by Yukon Department of Environment and Yukon Parks biologists, the Rangers note the day when the plants are snow-free, get their first leaves and flowers, and turn to yellow and die in the fall (depending on the species).
Salix arctic plot.
I’m Meagan, life-long Yukoner, northern researcher and dog musher, MSc student at the University of British Columbia, member of Team Shrub since 2009 and a Jane Glassco fellow. This summer I have been working on an internship to investigate the ecological monitoring program on Qikiqtaruk.
My project in collaboration with Yukon Parks, Team Shrub, and the Yukon Research Centre, Yukon College (support from Yukon Fish and Wildlife Enhancement Trust and Yukon Parks) has been to review this plant phenology program, summarize and collate results from the program with accompanying results from vegetation research by Team Shrub, and provide options for improvement.
A large part of this project has been asking questions and listening to the experience of the Rangers collecting the data. What started as a data synthesis project has swiftly developed into what will be several outputs, with the main goal being including the Rangers in the communication of this research. Some Rangers have been collecting these data for 8 years or more, and in my personal opinion the next step is to include them in the work that happens after the data are recorded, including both interpretation and presentation.
The new goals of my project are as follows:
Write a scientific publication with a team of writers that includes Yukon Parks, Team Shrub and the Rangers.
Present a poster of the current scientific findings of this ecological research including all collaborators at the ArcticNet conference this December, Canada’s annual Arctic research conference.
Make regular updates from researchers working on Qikiqtaruk to North Slope communities (via Facebook –Team Shrub and the Herschel Island facebook groups) and via the Yukon Government (brief contributions to annual reports).
Increased communication to those who collect data about why the data are collected and where it goes is key. I have experienced this over 8 or more field seasons as a field assistant. On the projects where I was included in discussions and my questions were answered I felt all the more willing to spend cold 4am mornings on mountaintops filming songbirds, or 12-hour days planting tiny tundra plants for a warming experiment. Yes, it was my job, but the quality of the experience was heightened when I was included, and this encouraged me to not only pursue more scientific research jobs but also to formulate research questions about the ecosystems I work in.
In a world where so few northern researchers are northern residents, who observe the landscape year-round and are collecting a composite memory of ecological history, it is key to increase the translatability of all kinds of data. The plant phenology program, in combination with the weather, snow, and wildlife monitoring on Qikiqtaruk, has immense potential to be a standout example and bridge between people living in the North and people conducting research in the North. From my time with the Qikiqtarukmiut (which means people of the Island, and more recently including those who spend the season on the Qikiqtaruk, both Rangers and Researchers) I think we can make it happen.
Salix arctica.
Dryas integrifolia.
Muskoxen.
Stay tuned for updates in the coming months!
Text and photos by Meagan plus photos from Cameron Eckert.
Team Shrub 