It is our 18th day on Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island and all is going
swimmingly – sometimes literally as members of the team have been swimming
almost daily in the Arctic Ocean! Our data collection has been going very
smoothly thus far. The drone missions have been very successful, we are
half way through the ecological monitoring, the plant trait samples are
getting collected, and our common garden willows are rooting away (or we
hope they are) in their beer bottles.

The Herschel Island scientific discoveries to date include:
1. Salix pulchra – the diamond leaved or beautiful willow – grows mostly
clonally rather than having clear root collars in the Herschel vegetation
type that is dominant on the island. This could mean that those willows
could possibly be older and much more genetically homogeneous than the
willows from Kluane! – Sandra

2. The Komakuk vegetation type that has more cryoturbation – movement of
soil due to freeze thaw processes – also appears to have more green
vegetation than the Herschel vegetation type that is less disturbed.
Interesting… – Jakob

3. The grass species Alopecurus alpinus is a recent invader to the Komakuk
long-term monitoring plots. It first appeared in 2009 and its cover has
increased nearly exponentially in a couple of the plots over the last five
years. So, it isn’t just the shrubs that are increasing on Herschel Island!
– Haydn

4. This year was the earliest green up and flowering year for Dryas
integrifolia (Avens), Salix arctica (Arctic willow) and Eriophorum vaginatum
(cottongrass) on record and also a year with very early snow melt. The
creeks are all dry as a result, making it a much drier and more bug free
island that usual. – Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island Rangers and Isla

There are more scientific discoveries to come including in relation to
herbivory (from Joe) and cottongrass tussocks (from Santeri).

So far the weather has been quite variable from sun, fog, rain, warm and
cold. When the weather has been good and the winds low, then the
researchers can take out the boats to explore other parts of the Island and
Yukon Coast. Yesterday was a rainy day, and Team Shrub stayed inside making
bread, doing data analysis and opening their data presents – revealing the
exciting patterns in their own data and making their scientific discoveries
(see above).

We have had a few more wildlife sightings including more caribou, some
distant muskox and a super cute baby seal on the beach.  We have also had a
visit from the Sir Wilfred Laurier Coastguard Icebreaker and a sailing boat
from London that is crossing the Northwest passage from west to east this
summer.  Today, there was a large tug boat with two barges that was seen in
the waters in front of Pauline Cove.  I guess Herschel isn’t so remote
after all!

As the icebergs come and go from the waters around Herschel Island, so to
do the members of team shrub.  Sandra is now far away on the other side of
the Canadian Arctic in Nunavik where she is collecting her root collar
samples from two sites on either side of a 1000km north-south latitudinal
gradient, just like she has been doing here in the Yukon. She is sadly
missed, sigh! And hopefully, later today or tomorrow once the fog clears,
Meagan will be joining us to conduct her internship on the ecological
monitoring programme here on Herschel. We can’t wait for her arrival!

As we have passed the midway point in our trip, it is time to start
celebrating our time together with the other research crews, rangers and
visitors. Tonight a community gathering is planned with games and hopefully
a musical jam session. And, if the forecast wind storm comes on Sunday
(winds of 30 knots), which is too windy for fieldwork, then that might be
the day of the annual Scottish feast in the style of a Robby Burn’s Day
dinner. Team Shrub needs to start planning our menu, speeches and put
together a list of Scots phrases for polite conversation during the meal.
We might even try to track down a caber-sized log on the beach for a bit of
caber tossing!

I will sign off here as the internet connection is slow and the bandwidth
very limited over the satellite phone.  Over and out from a rather foggy
Herschel Island in the Canadian Arctic…

Sent by #TeamShrub via satellite phone [via Meagan in Inuvik] from Herschel Island on 30 July 2015

As Isla was writing in our previous post, our drone Shrubcopter has taken its maiden flight on Herschel Island and has by now successfully flown a couple of missions. We are all thrilled with the results and very proud of our skilled pilot Captain Jakob Assmann! He has put together this short video so relax, fasten your seatbelt and enjoy your flight!

By Sandra

It is our 10^th day on Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island and our 38^th day in the Yukon, or so Joe was telling us today. I have completely lost track of time myself: the date, day of the week and time of the day. In fact, now we are living on Herschel time, which is a flexible time zone about an hour or so later than Alaska time, two hours or so later than Pacific Summer Time and about three hours later than Mountain Summer Time (the time in Inuvik).

Since the sun never sets and the long evenings of midnight sun are so beautiful, it feels quite natural to get up as the sun is getting higher in the sky (10:30am Inuvik Time) and go to sleep as it crosses over the horizon behind the hills of Herschel Island to the north of Pauline Cove (3am Inuvik Time).

We have left our first Herschel home of the Signals House and are now installed in the Team Shrub room in the Hunter’s and Trappers cabin. Our new room is decorated with a Welsh Flag, our science and cooking schedules, our library of books and of course all our science gear, including the drone laboratory.

Herschel is not an uninhabited Arctic Island at the moment. This evening there was a potluck BBQ with the assembled masses on the island of rangers, Yukon Government Archeologists, Heritage preservation experts, Parks staff and researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute and elsewhere. In fact, I have never seen Herschel Island as busy and filled with people as it is right now with around 30 visitors and residents.

Tomorrow Sandra will be leaving us. Sigh! The first departure from our tight Team Shrub Crew. She managed to collect all of her dendro samples after over a week of long days of measuring, mapping and digging. Thankfully, the recent weather has been beautiful and sunny, but windy enough that the bugs haven’t been bad at all, meaning great conditions for doing fieldwork.

The excitement of the past few days has been the inaugural flight of the Shrubcopter north of the Arctic Circle. Shrubcopter’s very first tundra flights were a series of post-transfer maintenance checks (a.k.a. test flights). Then today the Shrubcopter collected its first real data in a series of NDVI mapping transect flights using the autopilot.

Initially, there was a bit of fear in the pit of my stomach as our intrepid pilot Jakob switched on the autopilot and the drone headed off on it’s own to the pre-programmed GPS points. Now after eight flights my fears are starting to wear off and I am beginning to believe in our trusty drone, its flight control system and, of course, the pilot who always has things under complete control!

We now have awesome photos (NDVI and true colour) and videos of regions of the island to test which vegetation type is most green and have undergone the most greening over the past two decades. We are using our drone data to ground truth the greening signal that satellites are observing all around the Arctic biome.

The Root Collar Crew has been having so much fun that a series of botanically-themed songs have been written including an aria about Stellaria (Stellaria longipes), The Tundra King (about Betula nana), Beautiful Willow (about Salix pulchra), Old Man Willow Blues (about Salix richardsonii) and Ledum (about Rhododendron groenlandicum – formerly Ledum groenlandicum). We gather that Haydn is going to be putting together an entire album of tundra-themed melodies.

Our time on Herschel Island has been punctuated by amazing Arctic moments such as seeing icebergs floating down the coast on the north winds, and the pod of around 100 beluga whales that swam past the island this evening as we ran over to greet them on the outer beach of the spit at Pauline Cove. We have seen caribous, a rough-legged hawk nest with chicks, peregrine falcons, a short-eared owl, a family of foxes including six kits, voles, lemmings – including our favourite Ernest Lemmingway – and more.

Tomorrow has now arrived and the Twin Otter is on it’s way, so I better sign off here, so that this blog post can make it’s way back to civilization and internet connection.

Peace out from Team Shrub!

Santeri with caribou antlers

Jakob in a cloud of mosquitos!

Sandra looking down in our “freezer”: a cave dug in the permafrost!

Unloading the Twin Otter

A hole in the permafrost

By Isla

This week’s serving of Murphy’s law came in the forms of postal delays and mangey feet, meaning that two of us remain on mainland Canada, while the rest of the team head into wherever the sun is meant to be setting.

After delays at every level of Incompetence & Error Logistics Ltd. (other delivery services are available) Jakob’s drone finally arrived, just in time for us to postpone one of our charter flights. Despite Isla and Jakob spending hours – maybe even a day – calling couriers, we’re still waiting for equipment. The camera, which is supposedly arriving tomorrow, has pushed back the flight a second time, meaning I have to spend a few more days catching up on season 3 of ‘Orange is the New Black’. Joy.

As for the feet, there’s a bunch of gross stuff happening and I’m on some (delicious) antibiotics, but I’ll spare you the details – I don’t want to think about It and neither should you.

Fingers crossed for rapid deliverance.

By Joe

Today was our departure for Herschel Island.

It was a very early start with lots of running around, packing and unpacking of truckloads of gear and some stresses. But in the end we got on the plane and left our worries and e-mails behind us and flew off for our next fieldwork adventure. It was cloudy and misty in Inuvik when we left, but as our plane flew out across the Mackenzie Delta the clouds parted revealing a sunny Beaufort Sea with the odd beluga whale swimming through the waters below us.

We arrived on Herschel to a welcome crew of Richard Gordon (Head Warden), Ricky and Sam (Rangers) who helped us to unload our plane of it’s 2400 lbs of gear and food. We are all set up now in the Researchers Cabin our temporary home on Herschel until the AWI crew arrives.

Since arrival we have stored our food in the permafrost, taken an icehouse selfie, been attacked by clouds of mosquitos, gone on a short boat ride to blow the bugs away, been filmed by a drone, and met lots of new folks from the film crew (more info here) and locals visiting the island. The late evening sun is still high in the sky and the waters are sparkling and still as I look out the window of the researcher’s cabin.

It is wonderful to be back on Herschel Island again and to get to share this magical place with the Team Shrub 2015 research crew!!! We can’t wait for TeamShrub to be reunited when Jakob and Joe join us hopefully asap.

Next up after our delicious dinner will be a sauna and a swim in the Arctic Ocean!!! Woohoo!

Send by #TeamShrub via satellite phone from Herschel Island on 13 July 2015

The BBC World Service’s Science in Action programme will air a special episode on global warming and the arctic tundra today at 18:32 GMT (19:32 BST) featuring Isla and the findings from her latest Nature Climate Change research paper.

Click here to listen to a short clip of Isla from the episode!

By Jakob

It was finally time to for us to say goodbye to the ‘balls of sun’ of Kluane, pack our warm clothes and get ready to head to the far North. Packing meant reshuffling bags, storing away our fresh samples, ticking checklists and saying goodbye to the many old and new friends that we met over the last three weeks.

Though not all was work and sad goodbyes. The evening before our departure we drove east past Christmas Creek to a small lake, where we had heard that one could see the American beaver, Canada’s most noble mascot. We were not disappointed: soon after our arrival, an adult Castor canadiensis banged its tail on the water to warn his two fellows we were there.

But more was to come: early the next morning Tom the pilot from icefielddiscovery took us up to the St. Elias Icefields and the foot of Mt Logan in a small Helio Courier – the best plane out there for high altitude landings and takeoffs! The St Elias range houses the world’s largest non-polar icefields, Mt Logan the largest mountain in Canada and (what shall I say..?) the largest mountain in the world by girth. All those superlatives meant blue glacial lakes, steep rocky mountains and snow topped plateaus as far as the eye can see.

Once landed Joe took his shoes off and we all followed suit. According to Tom, it was the first ever barefoot walk he had witnessed on the icefields. To warm up we raced across the crunchy snow and enjoyed the heat of the sun.

Back at Base we finished our final tasks, stuffed our backs and hit the Alaska Highway back to Whitehorse. The three hour drive was spiced up by an unexpected sighting of a black bear enjoying the soapberries on the roadside and a stop at The Frosty Freeze in Haines Junction for ice cream.

We arrived in Whitehorse in the evening, where we met up with Santeri – the last team shrub member to arrive in the Yukon – and Meagan: finally, Team Shrub was complete! After another day of shopping, packing and brainstorming science we’re now ready for our journey North and the early, early start tomorrow morning.

By Jakob

Crevasses and melt water ponds on the Kaskawulsh Glacier

Team Shrub in the Helio Carrier

The Helio Carrier on top of the St. Elias icefields

The Kaskawulsh Glacier

Barefoot on the icefields

Team Shrub’s Exploding High Five

The boys from Team Shrub

The latest publication from the ShrubHub Network is published today in Nature Climate Change!  This is the culmination of an over five year effort to synthesize the growth of tundra shrubs at sites around the Arctic. We found high but variable temperature sensitivity of shrubs at sites around the tundra biome with higher climate sensitivity at sites with greater soil moisture and for taller shrubs (e.g., alders, willows) growing at their northern or upper elevational range edges.  Overall, the climate sensitivity of shrub growth was greatest at the boundary between the low and high Arctic, where permafrost is thawing and the majority of the global permafrost soil carbon pool is stored. Thus, the greatest climate responses of tundra shrubs might occur in the parts of the Arctic where the greatest climate change impacts and feedbacks are expected to occur.

Check it out at:
Climate sensitivity of shrub growth across the tundra biome

Press Releases
European Commission JRC
University of Alberta
Woods Hole Research Center
Université de Sherbrooke

Here are some of the media links as they roll in…
English:
BBC Science Hour
BBC Science in Action
CBC
Globe and Mail
Yahoo News
Physics Org
Reporting Climate Science
CTV News
Daily Mail

French:
Science Presse
La Tribune

German:
Die Welt
Stern
Der Standard
Science APA
Science Orf

Swedish:
forskning.se

We are back to semi-civilization after our second field data collection trip up into the alpine. This time the adventures and challenges were of an either furry, wet or buzzy nature.

Our first challenge appeared just as we were getting ready to head for bed on the first night. Haydn saw something blond and furry ambling around in the tundra a few hundred metres from our camp. It was what looked to be an adult male Grizzly bear that we called Jean-Pierre. We watched Jean-Pierre’s reactions to our presence and he seemed pretty relaxed, yet wary of us. With our food well cached far away and our tents close together, we felt it was safe to head to bed with our neighbour continuing his foraging into the night.

Over the rest of the trip we went on to see at least four bears total and perhaps more. We saw another chocolate brown Grizzly on a couple of occasions that we named Jean-“Clawed” a mom and a cub (Francine and “Fur”-dinand). The Kluane Plateau is a very bear-y place, but the bears were very respectful of us as we were of them. And bears weren’t the only wildlife we saw: there was a bumbling porcupine, soaring ravens, wandering tattlers, the robin with a nest and three blue eggs next to our camp, and more – including mosquitoes…

The next challenge was the day of rain that slowed down our progress. We tried to sleep in until the rain stopped, but the rain kept raining. So we made our breakfast in the drizzle, which reminded us all of truly Scottish weather, and then headed out for some field data collection. After a couple of hours, the wet was starting to seep through our rain gear, down our necks and up our sleeves and we were starting to get pretty cold. So we returned to camp and to our tents. The boys played games of cards in very cramped conditions, and some of us read books if we had brought them along, whereas I just rested my eyes. I haven’t got that much sleep over a 24 hour period for years!

The final challenge of the Kluane Plateau was the bugs. Once the rain had cleared and the sun returned, the normally stiff alpine breeze was absent and this meant mosquitoes. For the following day, there was a persistent humming in our ears, flies in our food and itchy bits on any exposed skin – we are still itching away. One member of our team, Joe, has decided to be truly epic (or possibly foolish) and to go without bug spray. The rest of us were only too happy to spray on some temporary relief from the insistent clouds of biting insect at every opportunity. (Don’t tell the rest of the crew, but the number of bugs that we were experiencing up on the Plateau was nothing to what we could encounter when we get up to Herschel!).

After four days of sample collecting and adventures in the alpine we made our way back down to “Base” (a.k.a. The Kluane Lake Research Station). But before leaving our temporary home on the Kluane Plateau we decided to summit the ridge as a group to take a last look at the panoramic views of snow-capped mountains and a glacial-fed lake (positively limnic!). As we reached the summit, we felt true “Tatenfreude”, the joy in anticipation of accomplishing something (or as Isla likes to think of it “Tartan-freude”, the joy that people from Scotland feel when they accomplish something).

By Isla

P.S. Our major scientific finding of the week is that willow (Salix pulchra and Salix richardsonii) seed germination rates can be very high when the catkins are freshly picked of the tundra shrubs. Check out these SUPER CUTE baby willows!