Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Gwich'in Settlement Area
Tags: physical sciences, permafrost, carbon fluxes, arctic ecosystems
| Principal Investigator: | Goeckede, Mathias (2) |
| Licence Number: | 17327 |
| Organization: | Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry |
| Licensed Year(s): |
2023
|
| Issued: | Jul 27, 2023 |
| Project Team: | Judith Vogt, Annelen Kuechenmeister |
Objective(s): To characterize the changes in carbon (CO2, CH4) and energy cycles that go along with the permafrost gradients/degradation, allowing to better understand the future feedbacks of currently undisturbed Arctic landscapes with an expected warmer climate.
Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No. 5609. As part of the ERC-synergy project Q-Arctic, the research team plans to investigate biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes along transects following landscape gradients. Such gradients include natural variability within heterogeneous permafrost landscapes, such as: a transect from dry upload tundra into a lower lying wetland area. The team is particularly interested in disturbance features (e.g. thermokarst, erosion, alas formation, ice-wedge degradation) within the Arctic permafrost region. Suitable transects in the vicinity of the Trail Valley Creek camp have already been established during field work in 2022, and the research team plans to revisit these sites in summer 2023 to continue the campaign started last year. The aim is to characterize the changes in carbon (CO2, CH4) and energy cycles that go along with the permafrost gradients/degradation, allowing a better understanding of future feedback of currently undisturbed Arctic landscapes with an expected warmer climate. Associated shifts in vegetation communities, as well as hydrological and soil conditions will also be investigated in detail. Within this framework, these fieldwork-based projects will closely interact with, and get support from, research activities within the other project components of Q-Arctic, including multi-disciplinary in-situ observations, satellite remote sensing and land-surface modeling at regional to pan-Arctic scales. The field work activities will be based on mobile flux chamber measurements, and ancillary observations, to characterize the small-scale variability in carbon and energy exchange between permafrost ecosystems and the atmosphere. The team that will be executing the field experiments will be equipped with a portable greenhouse gas analyzer for CH4/CO2/H2O mixing ratios (Licor LI-7810). This analyzer allows battery-powered operation in the field for daylong campaigns. Portable chambers (25cm diameter, transparent and opaque) will be equipped with ancillary sensors (e.g., temperature, radiation) as well as push-in probes for soil temperature, humidity, and pH. On a very limited scale, additional soil and vegetation samples are supposed to be taken for subsequent analysis in the lab. Since the research team only recently started the research program in the Inuvik region, besides contacts to Canadian researcher colleagues that have been active in the Inuvik region for longer periods there are only rudimentary contacts established with other parts of the communities yet. However, the research team is eager to continue collaborating with community members, ideally embedding them into the research, and also coordinate the planned research activities with local groups and communities. Results will also be shared with local, federal and territorial government agencies, if there is interest. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from July 28, 2023 to August 31, 2023.
