Successful gardening!

The main research goal for our project is to understand how plants and soil interact with each other during ecological succession. After a glacier melts, the new soil gets colonized by new plants. Those plants can change the soil and the invertebrates who live there. Those changes to the soil pave the way for even more plants to move in, which can also change the soil. This goes back-and-forth until you reach a mature Antarctic plant and soil community, like this one:

We want to understand more about how this process happens. How do plants change the soil at each of these stages of succession?

Last year, Dr. Hannah and I set up a "transplant experiment". (You can read the post from last year here.) This is a great way to understand how plants change soil. We started with bare soil that had not yet been colonized by plants... and then moved the plants in to make that colonization happen! Last year, we created our little "gardens" of Antarctic plants. 

Dr. Hannah "planting" some algae in one our transplant plots last year.

We planted two species of moss, grass, and an algae so that we can measure the impact of these different kinds of plants on the soil. We didn't know whether they would survive through the year. Winter can be very hard for new plants to survive, and the meltwater that comes with summer can wash a lot of plants away!

Now that we are back at Escudero, the first thing we did was go check our transplant plots. And... THEY SURVIVED! We were very happy to see that they are still in tact.

The ecosystem is still "waking up" for the summer, and some areas have been drier than normal. So the plants aren't very green, but they are alive and will be able to continue growing over the coming years.

We collected samples from each of the transplant "gardens". We collected one piece of each plant species, and the soil underneath of it. We collected these from each of our six replicate plots. This way, we can see how the plants have changed the soil after one year of colonization. I don't have any pictures of us sampling, though... it was VERY windy and cold! We worked as fast as we could, and we didn't take the time to snap photos in the heavy wind.

Now that we have the samples in the lab, we are analyzing the invertebrate and microbial community living in each one. We are also making measurements of the plant health and growth over the past year. When we are back in the U.S., we will measure the chemistry of the soil, how many nutrients have been added, and the physiology of the plants that were growing on them.

Dr. Hannah and Zoie working with one of the moss samples.

We feel good that one of our main tasks for this field season is complete. We are now busy in the lab for the next few days processing all of these samples!