Learning the work

This is Steve, the researcher who is leading our team's work. Today he showed us what we are going to be doing for the next 10 days to help gather data for the research project on Climate Change at the Arctic's Edge. Our part mainly involves gathering data about trees, vegetation, and soil in the forest, forest-tundra, and tundra zones at different sites around Churchill. We are going to collect tree cores, which means drilling out samples of the insides of the trees, to study the age, growth rate, and effects of climate on these trees.  We also are taking data on how many seedlings, saplings, and adult trees of different species are growing in different areas. Seedlings are trees that are only a couple of years old, and are less than 15 cm tall. Saplings are 15-200 cm tall, and above 200 cm are considered adult trees. The trees that we mostly see here are white spruce, black spruce, and larch. Today we practiced on white spruces. We also learned to identify a lot of the vegetation that grows in the different areas up here, like willow, rhododendron, fireweed, birch, two types of mosses, lichen, bear berry, buffalo berry, blueberry, and cranberry. You can look up pictures for these on your own, or check out some of mine. 

We took a tour of the area tonight before dinner and we saw someone's sled dogs tied up outside their house, an old shipwreck on the Hudson Bay, and even the wreckage of a plane crash from the 1980s. Tomorrow we go out into the field, so I'll have more information about the data we are collecting and how the climate is affecting the environment here, but don't worry about me and the polar bears until then, because Carly and her shotgun are watching out for me.