Summer of the Dammed.: Cold feet, smelly peat.

We seemed to have settled down into a bit of a routine here, which is good for giving us more time to relax (get bored). But it leaves me with less to write about that won't have you falling asleep after about two sentences. I will have to risk it this time by giving a bit more of a description of what "work" actually consists of. It may be informative, if not interesting. Hard to draw the line between what might be interesting for others, and what is too much information and being a self indulgent bore.


A pretty picture to distract you from the boring stuff to the left.

What I am doing here is visiting as many wetlands as possible to try and find out if they have peat in them. Looks like I'm going to digress a bit here, because I probably need to explain why I care about peat. It is to try and help out the poor Canadians with their terrible ineptitude at making whisky. Wait, no, that's not it, but could be a decent sideline. No, it's all about peat formation and how beaver may have influenced that over the past 20,000 years or so (in the mountains at least). Boring stat time. Peat makes up 3% of worldwide soil mass, but stores 30% of the worlds carbon. Factoid alert; Canada has approximately 9 % of the worlds peat, Scotland has just over 3% and is one 126th the size (best conditions for peat - rain rain rain). Anyway, I'm trying to get a handle on what sort of proportion of wetlands here are peatlands (generally 60% ish worldwide, which seems to be the average I'm getting so far). I also want to get a handle on what proportion of peatlands have beaver and show that they have been present for a long time. The technical bit that will hopefully follow, to be done by a proper scientist, will be working out how this affects hydrology and carbon storage. Depending on how much water peat is holding, and how it is decomposing, peat can fart a lot. Or hold it in. Possibly a case of better in than out. So, the important part is knowing how the beaver affects the farting.

That's the digression out of the way. What it all means for me and Jeff is that we have planned a bunch of day trips to wetland sites over the 8800km2 study area. On a friday we plan where to go each day the following week (there is the magic box work which we haven't started yet). Generally the day will start when one of us wakes up. I usually break first because there are no curtains in my east facing windows, so I get a 5.30 am wake up call. By 8am I'm ready to get up. Breakfast is eaten while we contemplate the day over facebook. Then we pack the gear up, and jump in the SUV. Jeff does the driving because I hold the maps (there's a video of a fairly typical commute up there). We head to what look like good starting points for finding these sites, usually to find it is a fair bit more difficult to find where to go on the ground, compared to looking at aerial photos and maps. My navigation is also pretty shonky, so we can do a few drive pasts before we park at the right spot. Once out the car, it's maps and GPS. I've worked out how to put coordinates into the GPS. this is quite useful since the trails and cut lines on the map quite often mysteriously disappear. That's when I decide to take a straight line going in the direction the GPS points me.

I love a nice stroll through snowmelt in the morning.

That is, mostly straight. The GPS signal bounces about a bit in the trees. I get the feeling Jeff doesn't appreciate the bushwhacking and river wading, and would rather I learnt to read a map properly. Eventually we will find our site. We can usually tell we're there. Our feet start getting wet and the trees stop. Our feet are usually wet from about 10am until we get back to the cabin. Once there, Jeff has some water samples to collect, while I take a soil core. Over 40 cm of peat and you can call it a peatland (some flaws with this definition may become apparent).

Jeff just needs to find running water or failing that, deep enough standing water. I need to spike the ground

I've also been working on levitation.

with what looks a bit like a 1.5m long spear. There's a reason I do the soil. The spear seems like a better weapon to fight of bears than plastic bottles! If I core and don't get 40cm of peat, I keep trying until I do, or get bored trying. Sometimes it will take up to 10 attempts (maybe you can see the flaws now). So 1 in 10 cores confirmed as peat and you have a peatland! Hmmmm. Also, given the farting nature of peat, poking holes in it tends to promote flatulence, and some of these can really pong. It's a bit like the bathroom after eating too many vegetables. Which is nice, because after taking a photo, I then get to scoop this lovely stuff into a bag and put it in my rucksack. If we are lucky we find a trophy to attach to the mid-sized SUV.

"hood hornaments"

Smells like bad poop, must be peat

So repeat that 4 to 6 times a day and there you have the field work. Data collection is fun. The rest is (more) boring admin and processing stuff when we get back to the field centre. Jeff filters the water, and I stick the peat in the fridge and try and translate my site notes into something useful on the computer. We managed 21 sites this week, and I only got us worryingly lost once. GPS died, but luckily I knew the road was west. Straight lined it again. This one had an extremely steep, heavily wooded hill on it. Also felt calling for help would be a bad idea as I was pretty sure we were on private property, and you get arrested for that sort of thing here.