Carpets of purple, white, pink and yellow flowers, shrubs with shiny green leaves, amazing sunsets shortly followed by sunrises, lots of phenology and community composition data – there were so many magical moments during my time as a field assistant on Team Shrub on Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island Territorial Park in the Canadian Arctic.
Here is a collection of photos and excerpts from blog posts – the titles include links to the full blog posts on the Team Shrub blog, where you can find many more exciting stories from the field!
The power of stories
“I feel like we could be sharing stories for hours” said Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island Park ranger Ricky to me one evening after we had chatted about our homes and cultures out on the rangers’ porch. I walked back to Signal’s House with a smile on my face, hoping that we would continue the conversation. Time has passed since that evening, we have shared more stories, and on a rainy day like today, it feels like just the time to tell you one more – a story about stories.
From one end of the world to the other, stories about how the world around us is changing and about the connection between people and land make me feel at home. Some of those stories have been scientific stories: a clear structure, many numbers and frequent reminders of why those numbers are important. Scientific stories take many shapes – journal articles, reports, presentations, computer code, blog posts and more. Just like a good story, a good scientific paper takes you on a journey through what we know, what we don’t know, and what it all might mean. Sure, there might be more graphs and less pictures than your usual story, but as a whole, scientists are professional tellers of very precise and accurate stories about how the world around us is changing and what that might mean for people and places.
Changes on Qikiqtaruk: Perspectives from Ranger Ricky Joe
There is no sense of time when you are travelling around here – you need a lot of patience. You need to know where and when to stop, when it’s safe to move on. Now everybody is always in a hurry, people travel to places quickly, but don’t get to fully experience them. There are journeys that used to take us days when I was little, and today we can travel to those places in hours. But you still have to remember to really experience the place, to stop and take it all in. My family and I, we just love travelling. It’s hard to say what we love about it – everything. The openness. We have all been travelling since we were very little. I was always with my grandmother and her dog team, helping her, hauling ice for fresh water and hunting.
Arctic smellscapes
Over the last two months we have often asked you to imagine what it would be like to be here with us in the Arctic. Through words, photos and videos, we have tried to bring the Arctic closer to you. So close that if you just imagine, you may well see it. You could even hear it. If you ponder the many changes occurring on Qikiqtaruk Herschel Island, from changes in vegetation structure and community composition to changes in what our life is like here, and listen again, you could hear a change. The Arctic – you can see it, you can hear it, and now, for a fuller experience, we present the Arctic smellscape of Qikiqtaruk, so you can smell it, too. It may have started as a joke, and there may or may not be talk of an Arctic taste- and touchscape, but for now, we do think that the Arctic smellscape represents a unique blend of aromas – smell alone could often reveal what is going on around us and how the landscape, and our day to day camp life, is changing.
Qikiqtaruk Book Club based on Mark Vellend’s “The Theory of Ecological Communities”
Qikiqtaruk is a beautiful and inspirational place – science chats are particularly special when you can see, feel, hear and even smell your study system change as the growing season progresses. Out during phenology data collection yesterday, we saw that the spring flowers are fading and seed dispersal is beginning… summer is well under way. And this year, in addition spotting awesome wildlife, admiring magnificent sunsets and informally chatting about science in our remote Arctic field site, we have also started a book club!
Our book club discussions are summarised in four blog posts:
Qikiqtaruk Book Club Part I: Ecological communities in the Arctic
Qikiqtaruk Book Club Part II: Selection in the Arctic
Qikiqtaruk Book Club Part III: Speciation, drift and dispersal in the Arctic
Qikiqtaruk Book Club Part IV: Theory and high-level processes in the Arctic
Tangled up in plots
It was a long stretch of hot days, almost as hot as the hottest day of the year, when, amidst the buzzing of mosquitos and boat noises, dramatic words echoed through the tundra – hour after hour, one could overhear: “Three live, two standing dead”, “Salpul, seven point four”, “Wait, how many were dead?”, “Four dead.” The soundscape of point framing!
Team Shrub has been going back to the same 1 x 1m plots on Qikiqtaruk for six years, and this year I was lucky to be there for the poinframing joy! Half of the plots are in the Herschel vegetation type, and the other half in the Komakuk vegetation type. The communities there are very different, as we previously pondered in our first book club blog post after we started reading Mark Vellend’s “The Theory of Ecological Communities”. We have kept up reading the book in between fieldwork this summer, and point framing in particular has been a thought-provoking companion to our reading. We will be posting our second book club post soon, but until then, grab an imaginary pin flag, and picture yourself in the tundra landscape as we share with you our impressions from the 2017 point framing season.
The hottest day of the year and the epic storm that followed
Imagine yourself alone in the tundra. But imagine it isn’t quite as cold as you might think. The sweat is dripping down your back, the whine of mosquitos is incessant in your ears. As you gasp for air while climbing the hill with your heavy backpack on, you just suck in the mosquito netting wrapped around your head. DEET coats your skin with a shiny plastic-dissolving sheen as polymer bonds around you are destabilized and carcinogens seep into you through your skin. This is the hottest day of the year on Qikiqtaruk.
Tough decisions have to be made on days like this – none more so that the perfect balance between having enough layers to avoid mosquito bites, but not so many as to boil in the humid Arctic heat. There came a point when the heat brought us to a naïve sense of bravery – the layers of clothing were coming off! Out of the frying pan, so to speak, and into the fire of mosquito bites and the eternal itching.
We are now all back from the Arctic and onto new adventures – I have started my PhD! My arctic summer, though, will always be a special adventure! Here’s to hopefully many more successful field season (and by that point, we might have gotten better at high-fiving)!
2016 was the year I really fell in love with science, research, and academia. I’ve always been a big fan of universities, but in 2016 I found out I not only like going to uni, I also don’t really want to leave it anytime soon. Having a very positive honours year and getting to do awesome fieldwork and RA work afterwards made me even more sure that I want to do a PhD. 2016 was also the first year for which I didn’t have a set plan – mostly because I was too busy to make one – but also because I wanted to become better at adapting to uncertainty (e.g. where will I live next month?) and change. Although I often felt like nothing is happening, except models running and running, 2016 was actually full of meaningful, challenging, and inspiring experiences!