A major goal this year on the terrestrial side of things is to quantify all things carbon (and more!) for the watershed of a small stream known as Y4, located a short walk from the Northeast Science Station. To accomplish a small group of terrestrially minded folk will be in Cherskiy from mid-July to early August. Our group consists of the following:

Heather Alexander: Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Brownsville

Logan Berner:            Research Assistant, Woods Hole Research Center

Vasily Lebedev:         PhD Student, Moscow State University

Mike Loranty:            Assistant Professor, Colgate University

Elizabeth Webb:        MS Student, University of Florida

Aaron White:              MS Student, University of Texas at Brownsville

In addition Sarah Ludwig (St. Olaf) and Sue Natali (WHRC) will be staying on with us once the core leaves.

Some of the specific things we’ll be doing to characterize the carbon dynamics of Y4 include measuring biomass in trees and shrubs, taking shallow permafrost cores to quantify below ground carbon pools, and measuring CO2 and H2O fluxes for different vegetation types and topographic positions around the watershed. Heather will also be looking at seedling recruitment in plots that she experimentally burned last year. More generally, we are all quite interested in landscape scale variability, specifically related to interactions between vegetation composition, fire disturbance, permafrost, and energy dynamics. So we’ll be working together to explore some of the processes that link those variables, as time and resources allow. This is going to be really fun, I can’t wait. More soon!