Heather Alexander, one of the five 2010 Polaris Project “Affiliates” (see Team page), has been awarded a prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue her work on the boreal forest in the Kolyma River watershed. In her proposal to NSF Heather described how she’d link her efforts with the Polaris Project. We look forward to it!
Congratulations to Heather! This is truly a big honor – we look forward to interacting with her in Siberia in 2012 and 2013.
As an irrelevant aside, though I first met Heather last summer, it turns out that we are each graduates of the same high school in Clear Lake, Texas (clearly a launching pad for arctic researchers). Go Falcons!
Max
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John Schade says
May 4, 2011 at 3:14 amCongrats, Heather, I am very happy you will be returning this summer.
Heather Alexander says
May 19, 2011 at 10:37 amWhen I first traveled to Cherskii in summer 2010, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I envisioned a landscape much like Interior Alaska, blanketed with coniferous forests of various ages and densities that showed obvious signs of originating following fire. What I found was an array of larch forest types, ranging from densely-stocked, ‘bamboo’-like forests with small-diameter larch, to ‘savanna’-like stands with few large-diameter larch interspersed among shrubs and grasses, to stands with only shrubs and grasses. These stands sometimes showed obvious signs of fire like standing dead trees, but oftentimes faint clues of past fires were only found by digging in soils for charcoal and scanning old, still-living trees for fire scars. In some stands, fire clearly impacted permafrost stability and soil subsidence, leaving behind thermokarsts and exposed mineral soils. In many stands, larch regeneration was sparse, even when mature ‘mother’ trees were nearby. This gradient in stand density, regeneration, and variability in fire influences highlighted the importance of understanding the controlling factors earlier in succession which created the forest stands as seen today. Understanding this variability seemed especially important because climate is warming, and wildfire extent, frequency, and severity are predicted to increase in high latitude boreal forests. If alterations to the fire regime decrease the age of forest stands and modify soil conditions in a way that impacts the ability of larch trees to germinate and establish, these changes will ultimately affect the ability of larch forest to sequester carbon.
In summers 2012 and 2013, I will return to Cherskii with the goal of shedding some light on this variability. My research will assess the effects of wildfire and permafrost stability on larch tree regeneration and subsequent consequences for forest carbon accumulation. I intend to experimentally burn forest plots to create conditions that mimic variability in fire severity to see if this alters active layer depth, soil moisture, nitrogen availability, larch seed germination, and early seedling establishment. I also plan to quantify variations in these parameters across natural gradients within recently burned areas. To understand how stand age and density influence carbon sequestration, I will sample a carbon pools within trees, understory vegetation, and soils across a variety of larch stands. While I know I’ll have my hands full, I am very excited about this research and working with my collaborators at the NSS, my mentor, Dr. Valentine Spektor, my sponsor, Dr. Michelle Mack, and the Polaris Project. It’s truly a remarkable opportunity to work with such incredible people, and I’m looking forward to learning more about Siberian larch forests.
As Max mentioned, another thing I totally didn’t expect during my first trip to Russia was to run into a fellow Texan with a similar educational history. There are probably weirder coincidences, but it’s definitely a strange feeling to be completely jet-lagged, standing in Red Square in Moscow, talking science, and eventually figure out that not only did you get your undergraduate degree from the same university (The University of Texas- ‘Hook-em Horns!”), but that you went to the same high school…very, very strange indeed.