With the 4-week and 6-week sampling under our belts, we're all feeling pretty comfortable with our methods now as we're heading in the last sampling period. Now with an added twist of trying a little side project of my own, we'll see how this next week will go. The weather hasn't been very conducive to warm, sunny summer field work, but hey- when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. This next week will consist of getting Ryan Jones' (Montana State University) samples, my side project of tile transplants (we'll be moving tiles from the +10 and +20 treatments into the +15 channel and we'll measure metabolism after 2 hours and again after 3 days of incubation), Tanner's regular metabolism data, N-up, P-up and Jill Welter's nitrogen fixation runs. We had a long day in the field last week when Jill and her crew decided to do three (yes, three) methods of nitrogen fixation in one day. It actually went relatively smoothly given that none of us had done anything quite to that scale ever, and overlapping the methods turned out to be a lot shorter of an endeavor than going out over several days.
All in all, the summer is coming to an end and there's a bitter sweet mood in the air- Iceland is just such a cool place, it definitely has brought out my inner nerd more than ever. Spending time in such a relatively new country really puts a new perspective on how you view the world and no doubt inspires a more thorough examination and interpretation of the landscapes we live in.
After one of our days in the field, we came home to a beautiful rainbow framed by the blooming lupines.
Símbolo da aliança!
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