Marcell Experimental Forest | Corner Conversations — Transcript

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1. 0:00We're kind of a early warning signal perhaps,
2. 0:02and I don't think we're that early because there's signals all over the planet
3. 0:06right now and things are going on that are not normal from a climate point of
4. 0:10view.
5. 0:16Hi, I'm Chris Garner of the Saint Paul
6. 0:17& Minnesota Foundation, here with another episode of Corner Conversations.
7. 0:22Today we're here at the Marcell Experimental Forest with scientist Dr.
8. 0:27Randall Kolka to learn more about the SPRUCE Experiment.
9. 0:32We're on the Marcell Experimental Forest right now.
10. 0:34It's one of our long-term research stations in the Forest Service and
11. 0:39we've been looking at these peatland ecosystems here since 1960.
12. 0:43And that led to the development of this really neat large climate change
13. 0:48experiment. The biggest one on the globe. The SPRUCE Experiment,
14. 0:52SPRUCE stands for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments
15. 0:55experiment. And we
16. 0:57built these giant enclosures to have the ecosystem experience that we
17. 1:02might expect in a future climate.
18. 1:04And we have a whole bunch of different climates that we're exposing them to.
19. 1:08And that's what SPRUCE is really looking at,
20. 1:10is trying to figure out at what temperatures do we have these points where we
21. 1:15might be going over the edge tipping points to some degree.
22. 1:18But the other goal is to really help to feed information into the models that
23. 1:23predict our future climate.
24. 1:25There wasn't a good modeling environment that included these wetland ecosystems,
25. 1:29although they're really important from a climate change perspective because of
26. 1:33the amount of carbon they store.
27. 1:35We're really helping feed these models that are gonna predict our future
28. 1:38climate, both locally, nationally, and internationally.
29. 1:42So in these ecosystems, we call them bogs, bog peatlands.
30. 1:47They're very inundated with water and they have a very low pH environment.
31. 1:52They're very acid.
32. 1:53A couple of the trees that can handle that are Black Spruce and Eastern Larch,
33. 1:57also known as Tamarack,
34. 1:59but they're not performing as well with warming as maybe some of the other plant
35. 2:03communities are out here. And cleaning the shrub community,
36. 2:06which seems to be taking off and proliferating as a result of warming,
37. 2:11which in a sense is really hampering the Sphagnum Moss's
38. 2:16ability to survive, which is the real critical component of these ecosystems.
39. 2:21because they're the plant that has created all the carbon that we're standing on
40. 2:25right here. The 10, 12 feet of carbon we're standing on.
41. 2:28That proliferation of shrubs is really causing a,
42. 2:33a situation where we're not gaining carbon anymore,
43. 2:37we're losing carbon in these ecosystems and there's not a lot of potential to
44. 2:41reverse it because we're losing the carbon gaining moss in the process.
45. 2:46So it's a double whammy.
46. 2:47We're losing two things at once that's both negative as far as what we can
47. 2:51expect for our climate changing.
48. 2:54It's very common at the end of a tour or a group and someone
49. 2:59will say, where can we help? How can we help? How can we contribute?
50. 3:03And we don't have a mechanism as a federal agency to accept anything like that
51. 3:07because it's your tax dollars that are paying for this.
52. 3:10But I think it'd be neat to have a mechanism by which we could help the
53. 3:15long term vitality of this place to make sure we have that long-term
54. 3:20stable funding that'll allow us to go another 63 years here and help out
55. 3:25our grandchildren and their grandchildren in the future.