Sebastian Szweda, Westminster College, gives a point-of-view look at a day spent summiting mountains in the Taku watershed for the global GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) project.
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Sebastian Szweda, Westminster College, gives a point-of-view look at a day spent summiting mountains in the Taku watershed for the global GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments) project.
he Llewellyn Glacier is retreating which provides an opportunity to view depositional glacial features such as recessional moraines, and to observe patterns of vegetative succession in newly ice-free areas. Perhaps future Round River students will one day have the good fortune of conducting a rain-free vegetation survey at the Llewellyn terminus, but we made the most of our rainy days, and were content to fondly recount this trip’s adventures from the comfort of Phil’s couch.
While the unrelenting daylight of Atlin doesn’t lend much to traditional nighttime pleasures, we’ve had the privilege of finally witnessing the beautiful British Colombia sunsets during Nighthawk surveys in the past two weeks.
The GLORIA project is a global project that maps out plant species on different summit altitudes. Sentinel mountain is the tallest mountain used for research in the GLORIA project. The data gathered from this four-day backpacking trip will be used to track and monitor species at different elevations which include Nival, high alpine, low alpine, and tree line.
By Andrew Corcilius of Northland College Thank you for letting us visit the glacier and giving us the opportunity to see Grizzly and Moose tracks along the shoreline of the glacial lake as I very well will never have that…
The group fans out and I find myself drawn to murmurs and shouts of more scat peppered throughout this flat and open terrain. Dr. Watine visits each person and I notice a smile curling on her lips. She marches proudly to the front of the group and clears her throat “This might very well be a wolf rendezvous site…” An explosion of whispers erupts between us but is quickly silenced by Dr. Watine “…and therefore I will be performing a wolf call in an attempt to bring some in.”
The process is simple; find the temperature loggers, which are small devices buried underneath rocks that track temperature data over a year and download the data onto a computer for research. Probably sounds easy to anyone who hasn’t looked for a temperature logger before. But the catch is, one of them is always nearly impossible to find. It’s like a game of hide and seek with your friends, but one of them goes into the yard and digs a hole in the ground to hide.
The plants begin to consume your mind, you walk with your eyes constantly scanning the ground for the tracks of who may have been here before you. There’s this feeling when you began to understand an ecosystem. It is almost as is you start to move through these spaces as if you are one with it, rather than above it.
Conservation is one language. To speak it is to approach the natural landscape through a valuable scientific lens. But we cannot account for the words our language misses. The cultural and historical connections, the footers at the end of the page. This highlights the importance of incorporating traditional ecological knowledge, such as Nyman’s, into conservation efforts. The more knowledge that can be compiled, the more likely we will be to truly conserve these landscapes in their entirety, not just in the language we understand.
by Madeline Waterman of the University of Vermont When our group first arrived around 2 a.m. at the Whitehorse Airport, everyone was bleary-eyed, hesitant to make conversation, and more than a little anxious about the onslaught of mosquitoes we were…
by Alex Railic of the University of Vermont In the first week of arriving in Atlin, there was some discussion about our group arriving at the south end of Atlin Lake – an area rarely visited by even the locals,…
by Christine Fleming of the University of Vermont At around 10pm on July 13th, we loaded into our two dirt-covered pickup trucks for the latest round of wildlife monitoring. With thermoses of hot tea in our hands and music blasting…
By Talia Loiter of the University of Vermont The first two-ish weeks here have absolutely flown by. It seems like the program is about a 3rd of the way over before having even really started. Life in Atlin is pretty…
By Ashlynd Greenwood of Weber State University Barry Lopez in “A Literature of Place” once asked, how is it that one can occupy a space and also have it occupy you? Lopez continued on this thought by mentioning the act…
by Kyle Weber, of Truman State University It’s only been a few days since the last blog entry, but in that time, it seems that so many lasts have happened. On Thursday we drove out to Consolation Creek to go on…
by Katherine Meyr, of Weber State University photos by Adam Spencer, Round River Instructor Over the course of our 6 weeks in B.C. we’ve been working on GLORIA (Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments). GLORIA is an internationally recognized methodology…
by Rain Keating, of Westminster University photos by Adam Spencer, Round River Instructor We recently had the honor to spend day at the Haa Kusteeyí Celebration in Carcross, YT. The event is hosted by the T’lingit Nation to bring communities together…