What grows here....

Guest post from M.Sc. student Valerie Freemantle

I am happy to say that my sampling has been going well and that Cape Bounty has started to feel like home. I wake up every morning looking out to the weather haven and West Lake. The days are long, but being outside and surrounded by science all day makes it such a rewarding place to work.

A view from the tent!

For my thesis, I am using digital pictures and satellite imagery in order to see if there has been any change in the vegetation cover at Cape Bounty since 2004. In the field, I have been revisiting plots that were sampled in 2004 and 2008 and using digital images to estimate the percent coverage of vegetation. When I return to Kingston, I will use these images to scale up to the satellite imagery this year. Then, I can relate these pictures and the data from 2004 and 2008 to satellite imagery and determine if there has been any change in vegetation between 2004 and 2017.

The vegetation in the Arctic has to be able to survive in some difficult conditions. The Arctic growing season is short and there is little on the landscape to block the wind. However, flowers still manage to survive in the slight depressions in the landscape where trickles of water flow soon after snowmelt.

For example, here are some Arctic poppies (Igutsat niqingit, Papaver spp.) blowing on a slope. They are all pointing towards the (never setting) summer sun. The areas where they have managed to establish themselves are in slight depressions where enough water flows to support lichens, mosses and flowers.

Arctic poppies

Another very common plant is the purple saxifrage (Aupilattunnguat, Saxifraga oppositifolia). This is the territorial flower of Nunavut. These little flowers provide bursts of colour all over Cape Bounty.

Purple saxifrage

The real powerhouse of sequestration in the Arctic is made up of vegetation like mosses and sedges. I need some more work learning to tell these apart, but there are many varieties of sedges and grasses at Cape Bounty. Here is a picture of some sedge and moss growing in a small water rack at the side of a rocky slope. The vegetation out here is pretty awesome.

Moss and sedges

Knowing how much vegetation is on the landscape is important. Vegetation is an important mechanism for removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it. Generally, the Arctic has been considered a net sink of carbon, meaning that it stores more than it produces. Mosses and sedges are a big component of this storage. But, with the anticipated changes in Arctic climate due to climate change, there is the potential that this trend may change. Thus, the next step of my project will be to link any changes in vegetation cover to changes in carbon sequestration. I am planning on doing this by relating the trends in vegetation growth from the satellites to measurements of carbon intake and output from eddy covariance towers here at Cape Bounty.