Leave No Trace

We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to work in an area as fascinating and informative as Hengill, and we hope to continue doing so for many years to come. In light of this, we try our hardest to reduce our impact on this fragile landscape. Yesterday, I raised the proverbial small army and we dismantled and removed our experimental channels from Hengill (including the 600 feet of tubing!). We transported all of the pieces back to Reykjavik, where we can safely store them over the long winter until the next field season. Many thanks to our Icelandic colleagues at the University of Iceland and the Insitute for Freshwater Fisheries! 

Dissembling the heat exchangers. Strange hot pot chemistry appears to have stained our equipment orange.

     Photo by J. Goldschmidt 

The first of many trips.

 Photo by J. Goldschmidt 

Photo by J. Goldschmidt 

Loading the cars at the river. 

     Photo by J. Goldschmidt

The former site of Lake Allison (our inlet reservoir for the channels) with natural flow conditions restored. 

Our experimental channel site cleaned up for the approaching winter. 

Keeping it real in California

I know the team thinks I was just relaxing on the beach during my recent trip to California. Think again!  I happened to catch a lecture by Dr. Geoffrey West, given for the 'Complexity Group' (http://www.stanford.edu/group/complexity/) at Stanford University. He gave a very interesting talk on metabolic scaling that was highly relevant to our research (despite the 167 slides!).  He had some fascinating new nuggets about aging and companies.

MacGyver-ing around the lab

When Tanner handed me a tea steeper and a piece of a plastic channel and said "connect this somehow..."  I quickly harnessed my MacGyver-chi and went searching around the lab for parts to complete this engineering task.  About 15 minutes of grumbling and mumbling, fumbling with rubber bands and zip-ties, I emerged from the lab with a Frankenstein-esque work of biomass-catching art.  Conveniently detachable for easy removal, I might add.  And the best part is, these puppies cost $0.00;  all of the materials can be dismantled and put right back in the lab. Cup-holder to come on edition 2.0.  We installed them the next day on Tanner's channels, and what do you know, they work! 

The idea was that there was a lot of biomass being schluffed off the channels and we wanted a way to capture it as to get an accurate representation of how much of what is actually being grown/moved around the tiles.  The result is this (quite colorful) hodge-podge of pencils and baskets and rubber bands. 

Last big bang awaits us...

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.

Happy 4th from the far north!

The experimental channels turn 6 weeks old and biomass is exploding in the warm treatments. We're pretty excited that the treatment effect we noticed early on is still holding strong. We just completed another full round of sampling over the past 3 days, and now we wait until our final sample event two weeks from now. What will they look like then?   

Photos taken June 27th, 2013

4 week sampling crew

Just wanted to give credit to the large team of folks helping me with the first (4 week) sampling event on the experimental channels. We had uncharacteristically good weather for 2 of the 3 days, any more of that and I'll become spoiled!

The crew:

Left to right: Ellie Zignego (Montana State U.), Tanner Williamson (Montana State U.), Jill Welter (St. Kate's U.), Amiee Ahles (St. Kate's U.), David Hernandez (U. of Alabama), and Jackie Goldschmidt (St. Kate's U). Not pictured are Dan Nelson and Jon Benstead (both U of Alabama).  

Photo courtesy of Jackie Goldschmidt 

First Sampling Done!

Woohoo!  After a rainy, windy start, we successfully completed our first round of sampling in the channels!  The Welter crew, John Benstead, Tanner and I all went out on Wednesday to get started on the process.  The Welter crew checked out around 1pm to head back to give a presentation, and boy did they leave just in time.  John, Tanner, and I were left to do the sampling (which ran quite smoothly, once we got our rhythm down), but not without some treacherous rain.  There were about 4 or 5 really good rainy sessions lasting upwards of 45 minutes.  The sun would pop out for a second, giving us hope, and then not too long after the winds would pick up and we would once again submerge ourselves in our waterproof cocoons.  Dan and David came out for the last hour or so to check out the sampling and to help carry back some equipment.

The next two days, however, were uncharacteristically warm and sunny! We broke out the sunscreen and kicked off our shoes, letting the mysterious, glowing orb in the sky warm us up.  With one set of sampling done, everyone (especially Tanner) can relax and be a little more confident in the sampling process.

Enjoying the squishy (dry!) ground on bare feet!

View of the valley- if you look on the left hand side, the pool of water is the medium-warm hot pot Tanner uses to heat the water

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