Our first field visit of 2021 to the FENCES sites was on June 19-21. The spring is a bit late this year - everything was still brown and the dwarf birch was only shyly starting to leaf.
Campsite in Þeistareykir
As usual in our first annual visit we had many things to do, getting ready for the summer! The first thing was to apply fertilizers to the NutNet experimental plots. We started the fertilization experiment back in 2016, in four NutNet sites (one site in each of the two habitats in Auðkúluheiði and in Þeistareykir). Initially we had the full NutNet design at the sites in Auðkúluheiði, but since 2020 we are only maintaining the full fertilizer and fence part.
In the heath in Auðkúluheiði we also installed mycorrhizal bags for a project coordinated by Cole Brachmann and Robert Björk at the University of Gothenburg. The aim of this project is to evaluate the growth of fungal mycelia in arctic soils and how it is affected by the presence of herbivory and increasing abundance of deciduous and evergreen shrubs. The mycorrhizal bags are incubated for different periods of time, up to three years! This is now the second year of the project and we retrieved bags that had been incubated for 12 months and installed new ones that will be retrieved by the end of the summer.
We installed teabags for a coordinated study coordinated by Maria Väisänen funded by the UniOulu Arctic Researchers’ Network. Following the TeaBag Index protocol, the teabags will be incubated for 3 and 12 months in the field, and will provide data on decomposition rates comparable to the baseline data collected by Katrín Björnsdóttir in her MSc thesis in 2016. Looking forward to seeing if there are any differences after six years of grazing exclusion!
Finally, this year we had a special guest in our field team, Qurbonsho Gandoliev, researcher at the Pamir Biological Institute and GRÓ LRT fellow from Tajikistan. Qurbonsho collected soil samples for his research project where he will assess the impact of grazing exclusion on C storage in Icelandic soils. Stay tuned for Qurbonsho's results!
