We have had a productive day of sampling! We visited a new site on Nelson Island, which is nearby to the peninsula where the research station is located.
At Nelson Island, we started sampling one of our "transects" through the successional zones stretching away from the glacier. We sample three areas: one near the glacier (where soil is newly exposed, which we call "early succession"), one area where ecological succession has reached its fully developed climax community in "late succession", and one site in between. We call this one "mid succession". We are using the different distances from the glacier to represent how much time has passed for ecological succession. The more developed site with a lot of vegetation has been exposed longer, which allows succession to reach its fully developed ecosystem. (You can read more about our transects with this post from last year about the one we did here on King George Island.)
We started with the late succession site that has a highly developed plant community. We had to work fast because we only had six hours to get our work done! One of the main things we do at each site is to describe the plant community.
Zoie and Hannah worked on this by laying down a 10-meter line and measuring the community at every meter. We put a square on the ground and count everything inside the square. We end up counting the community in 50 squares (five different 10-meter transects), and we use this to calculate which plants are the most dominant.
Then we get to the important part! We take samples from each of the dominant plant species. We collect some of the plant and the soil beneath it. Here I am taking one of the samples at our late succession site:
We take samples from the four most dominant plants, and also bare soil with no plants growing on it. That lets us see how plants change the soil by comparing it to soil with no plants growing on it. And, we do that at our late succession, mid succession, and early succession sites. We end up carrying a lot of soil in our backpacks!
You can see the difference between our late-succession site (above) and our mid-succession site (below) with less vegetation. This site has been exposed for a while, and there are several different plant species living there, but there's not as much vegetation as in late succession.
We ran out of time before we could get to our early succession site. We have to spend a LOT of time hiking through the moraines to find the best sites to work at. We had six hours but only finished the mid and late succession sites! We will hopefully go back soon to finish with the early succession site.
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