Media Category: BNZ

Bonanza Creek researchers use boats to access many of their floodplain research sites along the Tanana river. This day was so smoky from the nearby McDonald Fire that it was hard to see the far bank at times.

Bonanza Creek researchers use boats to access many of their floodplain research sites along the Tanana river. This day was so smoky from the nearby McDonald Fire that it was hard to see the far bank at times.

Cedar Schmitz-Guy stands wader deep in a creek at the Bonanza Creek LTER. This project charts the amount of organic material flowing through these waterways.

Jason Downing instruments a white spruce tree with a small, cheap dendrometer (foreground) that measures incredibly fine scale tree growth. Initial data from these sensors shows that trees actually change diameter throughout the day—this project expands that research to new biomes and tree types.

Among the spruce in the Caribou-Poker Creek watershed, the first thing that’s pointed out to me in the watershed is the pattern of trees on an adjacent hillside, with a few pockets of tall, old spruce sticking high above shorter, younger vegetation. “You can see how inconsistent that fire was,” Jason Downing tells me, pointing out that the landscape only looks the way that it does because it burned a decade ago.

A fuel break doing as intended—stopping fire. This fire burned through flammable black spruce forest, but once it hit the fire resistant deciduous trees in the photo, it stopped.

BNZ graduate student Nick Link walks through burned spruce forest in the aftermath of the McDonald Fire.

A fuelbreak in the black spruce forests. Fuelbreaks are great at preventing fires from spreading, but removing trees has serious ecological implications.

The author uses vegetation plots to study which species return first in cut Black Spruce forests.