Our Research
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The goal of this project is to document and understand arctic terrestrial ecosystem change.
The project is a collaboration between Grand Valley State University (GVSU), Florida International University (FIU), University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and the University of Alaska at Anchorage (UAA).
The primary research sites at Toolik, Atqasuk and Utqiaġvik where originally established as part of the International Tundra Experiment in the mid 1990s; as such each site has an embedded warming experiment that uses open-top chambers to forecast future changes due to regional warming. In 2010, the researchers expanded the spatial scale of our observations to capture changes occurring across the landscape.
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The two main ways we have expanded coverage is to include measurements across a 1 km square grid of plots and to use a mobile instrumented sensor platform (MISP). The MISP system is designed to measure a large array of surface properties with minimal effort. The platform is suspended between two towers and is run daily to capture dynamics associated with different vegetative cover, soil, and underlying permafrost. These measurements capture the fine-scale changes in vegetation over the growing season that are challenging to measure manually. The observations also provide a bridge between manual measurements and aerial imagery that can be scaled to the landscape level.
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GVSU
The GVSU team is focused on understanding tundra vegetation change.
The GVSU component of the project takes leadership of manual measurements of phenology, growth, and community composition. Due to safety and logistical reasons it is necessary to have no fewer than two people at a location. All the projects work together. Therefore, the GVSU crew collects nearly all the field measurements at Atqasuk with training from UTEP and FIU and runs the MISP at Utqiaġvik.
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GVSU's contribution
FIU
The FIU team is focused on understanding tundra ecophysiology.
The FIU team is responsible for conducting the daily MISP runs at Toolik and Imnavait and works closely with the GVSU team that operates the daily MISP runs at Utqiaġvik and Atqasuk.
FIU personnel manage all the data from the four MISP systems. FIU personnel also collect point framing, phenology, plot reflectance, and plant functional trait measurements at Toolik and Imnavait Creek and the peak season flux measurements at Utqiaġvik, Atqasuk, and Imnavait.
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FIU's contribution
UTEP
The UTEP team is focused on understanding the landscape dynamics of tundra ecosystems.
The UTEP component of the project takes leadership of the Alaskan and ITEX phenocam network, repeat UAS flights over the Alaskan sites, repeat terrestrial LiDAR surveys, and plot to satellite scaling activities. The UTEP team will also actively participate in collaborative activities, ensure active participation in related network activities (e.g. ITEX phenocam network, the High Latitude Drone Ecology Network ~ HiLDEN), and provide training to GVSU and FIU personnel who will care-take some field-based measurements that will result in substantial travel savings.
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UTEP's contribution
UAA
The UAA team is primarily focused on understanding the annual carbon balance of tundra ecosystems.
The UAA team takes leadership of our ecosystem process studies and coupling them to our measurements of phenology, growth, and ecophysiology under a suite of New Arctic climate scenarios at Toolik Lake. In addition UAA will lead the soil C synthesis including obtaining and arranging for a common set of soil analyses.
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UAA's contribution