Abisko - Research

I finished my research! Just in time before the leaves started falling. Let's take a moment to see what I was/am doing:

Having a little snack break

For my thesis work (at both NC State and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) I'm looking at Fluctuating Asymmetry (FA) in birch leaves. Fluctuating Asymmetry in birches is when the two halves of a leaf are not the same width (the leaf is not symmetrical). When living things are supposed to be symmetrical, but they are not, this is usually due to some sort of stress they were under during development. This was first used in animal studies a lot (your eyes are supposed to be at the same level, your arms the same lengths, etc (btw, my eyes and my arms are both different. That could explain a lot), but then it was found to be useful in studying conditions that put plants under stress as well. It's been used a lot in studies of birch trees at pollution sites and for climate change studies (birch being one of the last tree-line species).

This is the mountain where I did most of my sampling.

Way up there

I climbed up here every day

To calculate FA all you have to do is take a leaf and measure it on either side of the mid-rib. With zero FA the two halves would be the same size. Pretty simple and requires no special equipment. Plus, you can pick the leaves, press them, and then measure them at your convenience. So this is a pretty useful technique for evaluating stress. What I'm interested in is if it (wow, that was a lot of 2 letter I words right there) matters where you pick your leaves from on a individual tree. In all the studies I've looked at, they either pick a leaf from the tree randomly (which could be okay if you pick a lot of leaves, but some of the studies they pick as little as one (count 'em, one) leaf per tree), or picked an arbitrary point on the trees to take the leaves from (say, second branch from the bottom on the right). But it's been shown in other plants that it can make a big difference where you take your leaves from, and that's what I'm trying to find out about birches: does it matter where you pick your leaves on the tree.

My highly scientific research notebook. It was either this one, kittens, or dolphins. 

I'm looking at trees from 3 different groups, those that grow in the valley, the ones at the forest limit (the highest place up where the trees still resemble a forest), and the tree-line (those brave little stunted tress on their own at the top of the mountain).

A typical valley tree

A hardcore tree-line tree

I selected 10 trees from each of these groups, and for each one I divided it into top middle bottom, north south east west, and inner outer sections, and took a leaf from every combination of these three (i.e. bottom north outer (BNO) or top east inner (TEI)).

An example from my highly scientific research notebook

So 24 leaves per tree, 720 leaves total. And as I collected them I put them in a press. I have to wait for them to dry and then I can measure them. THAT'S gonna be time consuming. And I don't even know how I'm going to do the statistics on all those variables. But that's a headache for later.

So not really that tedious of work, but lets not forget about those mosquitoes, and the fact that I had to climb a mountain every day (and these are no old, Appalachian mountains around here. These are some tall youngins). And it was raining a lot so that slowed me down some (can't press leaves in the rain or they get moldy). But otherwise pretty pleasant work.

Here's the research station, which I didn't really do much in besides escape the mosquitoes and use the internet. And walk around feeling like a cool scientist.

Some of the buildings. duh. 

The library where I would mess around on Facebook, but pretend like I was doing something much more scholarly. 

An appropriately scientific painting of frogs "getting it on."

The awesome ceiling lighting in the dining room

I discovered the mosquitoes weren't quite as bad in the morning (and by morning I mean 2:00 in the morning). So I got in the habit of either staying up until 1:00 or so and then setting out up the mountain, or (more typically) going to bed around dinner time and getting up at around one. Time was so strange in Abisko. Since it never got dark, and I wasn't doing anything that had to coincide with anyone else's schedule, it was kind of like I was living without time. I ate whenever I got hungry and slept whenever I was tired. It was an interesting lifestyle.

Heading out

It's foggy down below

I didn't build these rock sculptures or put the artistic fog there, but I did find them and take the picture!

An approaching storm

So just how much better where the mosquitoes that it made climbing a mountain every night at 1:00 worthwhile? Here's some examples of "manageable" mosquito levels:

Trying to bite me through my glove

And this was a first: Being bitten by a mosquito, but my finger is too cold and numb to feel it. 

But one of the perks:

Blueberries!