Visit to Qarmartalik School in Resolute

We had a fun afternoon today visiting the school in Resolute. I talked to the students about my research and about Arctic plants. They were an enthusiastic, lively bunch with many questions especially about the use of plants and which plants they could eat. Resolute Bay's population is under 200 but there are over 40 students at Qarmartalik School, ranging from grade 1 to grade 12.

Grade 7-12 Qarmartalik School students on a mini field trip
to look at the local plants in Resolute

We went outside to a nearby hill to see what plants we could find. I thought we may not find anything as there is still quite a bit of snow on the ground but there was lots to see. It was a beautiful sunny, warm  day - a few degrees above zero anyway - and the kids were so happy to be outside in the fresh air.

Grade 1-6 Qarmartalik School students
with the whole town of Resolute in the background

We found purple saxifrage (Saxifrage oppositifolia) with large flower buds that will likely open in the next few days and even one tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga cespitosa) flower open! There were a number of catkins coming out on the Arctic willow (Salix arctica) and many other species just beginning to green up.



Purple saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia) and Arctic willow (Salix arctica)

Temperatures are sooo much warmer near the ground!

Last year I set up temperature sensors, 1m above ground, 5cm above ground and just below the ground surface at one site near camp at Lake Hazen and logged the hourly temperature for the whole summer. The results are really quite interesting.

 

Temperature sensor set up 1m and 5cm above ground and
at ground level at Lake Hazen in 2014

Firstly even though there is 24 hour sun and the sun is approximately the same height above the horizon over the 24 hour period, the temperatures do go through a daily cycle; warmer during the "day" and colder at "night". It surprised me at first but then I realised that during the "night" the sun's rays have a lot further to reach the ground at "night" because the sun is on the other side of the world.

Temperatures at Lake Hazen in 2014 were much warmer
close to the ground and during the "day"
even though there is 24 hours of daylight.

Secondly the temperature near the ground, where the plants grow,  is much warmer than the temperature measured at 1m above the ground, where weather station temperatures are measured. This is part of the reason why Arctic plants never grow very tall, it is just sooo much warmer near the ground! Many of the plants create their only little micro-environment by forming a hemi-spherical cushion to maximise the heat and nutrients the plant receives.

The cushion forming tufted saxifrage (Saxifraga cespitosa)
makes its own microenvironment

I had temperature sensors set up at both Iqaluit and Lake Hazen last year and one thing I have found through my analysis is that during the middle of the growing season, July, the average temperature at 5cm above ground at Lake Hazen is pretty much the same as at Iqaluit even though the two locations are over 18° of latitude apart. However, the temperatures at Iqaluit tend to get much warmer during the day and dip lower at night than at Lake Hazen.



Comparison of 2014 temperatures 5cm above ground at
Lake Hazen sites (dotted lines) and Iqaluit sites (solid lines).
The average temperatures are the similar at Lake Hazen and Iqaluit
but Iqaluit temperatures very more during over a 24 hour period  

2015 Field Season at Lake Hazen

I am about to leave for my third field season at Lake Hazen, Quttinirpaaq National Park on northern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada! This year the focus of my research will be to study the time of flowering and fruiting of plant species along an elevation gradient. The elevation gradient has an associated temperature gradient which I hope to use as a proxy for climate change to predict the rate of change of flowering and fruiting with rising temperatures of climate change. I can also look at the inter-annual variation in flowering and fruiting times of the 38 species I have been studying at Lake Hazen from 2013 to 2015.

The 6 plant species I have chosen for the climate change proxy study grow from Camp Hazen on the shores of Lake Hazen to almost the summit of McGill, an elevation gain of over 800m.

Plant species in elevational gradient study, clockwise from top left:
Purple saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia); Mountain avens (Dryas integrifolia);
Arctic poppy (Papaver dahlianum); Arctic white heather (Cassiope tetragona);
Prickly saxifrage (Saxifraga tricuspidata); Sulphur buttercup (Ranunculus sulphurous)

Contrasting Years

Zoe Panchen

In an earlier post, I mentioned that Lake Hazen this year was much warmer and had far less snow than last year. There were other interesting differences too. On my last day at Lake Hazen last year I finally found the bright yellow Arnica (Arnica angustifolia) flowers that I had been searching for all summer. They carpeted a stream bank below McGill Mountain. Now that I had found where they grew, I was keen to monitor their flowering time. This year though, although there were plenty of plants on the bank, there were only 20 flowers, a far cry from the hundreds of flowers last year on the very same bank. I have a couple of ideas as to why this might be the case.



Bank covered in Arnica (Anica angustifolia) flowers in 2013



The same and wider view of  the bank of Arnica (Anica angustifolia)
with just 20 flowers (marked with white plant tags) in 2014

Arctic plants pre-form their flower buds the year before. This is so that they can maximise the short growing season and not waste time developing flowers at the start of the growing season. Arctic plants also tend not to flower every year. Flowering requires a lot of energy and because the growing season is so short and there are few nutrients in the Arctic soil, it can take several years to gain enough resources to produce flowers.

Arnica (Arnica angustifolia) and spider Lake Hazen 2013

 

The year before I started doing my phenology research at Lake Hazen (2012) was similar to many in the last decade, much warmer than in previous decades. It was likely therefore a longer growing season, enabling the Arnica to pre-form its flowers. Along comes 2013, an atypically cold year, the Arnica flowers profusely but late. So it is possible that the Arnica used all its available resources last year flowering and hence did not have enough left to preform buds for this year. The other possibility is that because 2013 was such a cold, short summer that there was not enough time for the Arnica to preform buds for 2014.

Artctic White Heather (Cassiope tetragona) bush
covered in white flowers in 2013

Arctic White Heather (Cassiope tetragona) bush
with just 3 white flowers in bottom right hand corner in 2014.
Note the large number of spent flowers and capsules from 2013.

I noticed the Arctic White Heather (Cassiope tetragona) too this year had few flowers compared to last year, particularly in a gully high up on McGill Mountain. Last year the bushes were covered in white flowers but this year each plant only had a handful of flowers if any at all. The heather relies on the insulation of snow cover to survive the harsh Arctic winters. At Lake Hazen it only grows in gullies, depressions and the lee side of hills where the snow forms drifts. An additional reason why there may have been fewer flowers this year could be the lack of a protective layer of snow killed off many of the stems with pre-formed flower buds. The gully on McGill Mountain was filled with snow last year but not this year. There did seem to be a lot of die back on the heather this year too.

Arctic White Heather (Cassiope tetragona) Lake Hazen 2013

Bunny Trouble

Zoe Panchen

Field work often comes with certain unforeseen issues and in my case that seems to have been the antics of the wildlife. A muskox tripped over one of my temperature data loggers and dragged the whole set up a few yards but amazingly it continued to work. The Artic Hares, on the other hand, just love to eat. They chewed through a temperature sensor wire, ate plants I was monitoring and even had a go at the plant tags labeling the plants. In Iqaluit the problem was with Ravens and humans pulling out plant tags.

At my highest site, 750m up McGill Mountain, I arrived one day to find what looked like a mini hurricane had gone through with plant tags strewn everywhere! In some cases it was possible to match the plant tag with the correct plant but in many cases monitoring that plant could no longer continue.

Mmmm …. lousewort flowers, my favourite!

On a couple of occasions there was an Arctic Hare at “work” close to our sites and the cute “bunny” clearly has a preference for flowers rather than leaves; high on the list of favourites are Arctic Louseworts (Pedicularis arctica), Arctic Poppies (Papaver) and Spider Plant (Saxifraga flagellaris) flowers.

A-hunting we will go!

Zoe Panchen
I just returned from my field work at Lake Hazen, there is no internet in the wilds of 81°N so this and
the next few post will be an update on my time from 13^th June – 2^nd Aug at Lake Hazen.

Although my passion is plants, I have to say the high light of my time at Lake Hazen was seeing a pack of Arctic Wolves heading out on a hunt go by just 100yrds away. We had barely set out of camp when I saw a white movement just over the rise ahead. I thought it might be the Arctic Hare that often visited camp but just a few seconds later an Arctic wolf appeared. It was too far away to take a good picture and I needed to change to my zoom lens so I just watched as it continued on its way across the tundra. Then another wolf appeared and then another and then there was another just by us. I don’t know who was more surprised the wolves or us. I just had time to get out my camera, change lenses and take a few pictures as the last wolf went by.

Last of the pack of eight Arctic Wolves passing Camp Hazen

While there was truly a wow factor to seeing these animals up close in the wild, what really blew me away was the ease and speed with which they moved across the tundra. In less than ten minutes they had covered the distance from Camp Hazen to the Snow Goose River delta, a distance that would take me about 1/2hr. Just amazing to see a line of 8 white wolves moving effortlessly across the tundra below Omingmak Mountain.

Three of the pack of eight Arctic Wolves moving
effortlessly across the tundra by Lake Hazen

The End of Flowering

Emma Micalizzi

A last blast of colour from arctic fireweed (Chamerion latifolium).

July is almost over and almost all of the plants that we are monitoring have already finished flowering, and some species, such as purple saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia) and one flower fleabane (Erigeron eriocephalus), have already began dispersing their seeds.  It feels like not that long ago that we were walking through snow and tagging plants that hadn’t come up yet, based on dead growth from last year.  In fact, some of our sites still had snow in places just a couple weeks ago.  Now we are beginning to pull tags out of the warm tundra where plants have finished dispersing their seeds.  It seems like the plant life cycles move very quickly here as the plants try to fit everything in before the impending winter.  The transition between most of our species being in peak flower and virtually no plants flowering was a very abrupt one, and some of the plants that still had flowers last week now have rapidly developing fruit, like the Lapland lousewort (Pedicularis lapponica). 

Ice still present in the Sylvia Grinnell River, a reminder that winter is never far away.

Another reminder that we are in the Arctic,  We had thought that ground here had been thawed for a while until on one visit when I suppose the ice broke free of the permafrost.

Some fledglings newly out of their nest.

As the plants finish flowering, the fledgling birds flee their nests, and the last of the ice finally disappears, it feels like summer is making its last stand before temperatures beginning falling and winter encroaches on Iqaluit.  I feel like my summer has flown by and it’s hard to believe that Zoe will be back in one week, and that I will leave in two weeks.  I feel like I still have a lot that I want to do and see while I’m here, and I’m wondering how I will fit it all in.  Fortunately I did get an opportunity to go for a hike up the Sylvia Grinnell River last weekend, and it was nice to see a side of the tundra that was more desolate than some of our sites.  I’m still hoping that I’ll be able to go sea kayaking before I leave and see the islands where the Sylvia Grinnell River opens into the bay. 

I’m sure that these last two weeks will fly by as fast as the past two months and before I know it, I’ll be heading south to a land with trees and dark nights.  I have thoroughly enjoyed conducting the field work this summer and spending time in Iqaluit.  I think that this has been a great experience that I will take a lot from and I feel very fortunate to have had this opportunity.

The view from a hike up the Sylvia Grinnell River.