“We successfully completed our field campaign in Alaska this past summer. The Wetland Foundation Travel Grant was critical to covering costs of scientific equipment needed for the campaign.
The field campaign was conducted during July 2021 at the Big Trail Lake wetland site, located in the Goldstream Valley Watershed in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Goldstream Valley Watershed is part of the discontinuous permafrost zone, with permafrost occurring in the valley bottom and north-facing slopes. Big Trail Lake is a newly formed, abrupt-thaw thermokarst lake that was formed from a wetland sometime between 1949 and 1967. Sampling was conducted in wetland areas north of the lake, with vegetation cover dominated by mosses, graminoids, and shrubs. We used a portable greenhouse gas analyzer to collect chamber-based CO2 and CH4 flux data for a sample of points across the site . At each point location, we also measured in-situ soil moisture, soil temperature, soil pH, and vegetation percent cover, and we collected soil samples for chemical and genomic analysis (Figure 3b). We installed a ClimaVUE weather sensor to collect site-level meteorological data such as air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and wind speed. To collect high-resolution imagery of the site, we conducted drone flights with a multispectral sensor that collects imagery in blue, green, red, red-edge, and near-infrared bands.”
