Welcome to Arctic the Culture Cure, the podcast all about Canada's Arctic, the climate, the animals, the land, the people, the culture and what it can teach the rest of the world. I'm your host, Rob Fagan. Dr. Isla Meyer Smith is a global change ecologist from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Aila completed her undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada, achieved her Master's at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and her PhD at the University of Alberta in Canada. Since 2013, Aila has been a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a Senior Lecturer. Aila has been part of many papers published on Arctic warming and has received awards for innovation in teaching for visiting schools and engaging and inspiring students with her presentations on ecology and Science. Aila has 12 field seasons under her belt conducting research in the Arctic and sub Antarctic. Aila is known for enthusiasm and energy and she successfully brought together teams of researchers, including Team Shrub, which she continues to conduct research with in the Arctic. Aila and Team Shrub study plants in the Arctic and beyond and how ecosystems are responding as the planet warms. Using traditional tools and new technologies such as drones, they are capturing Arctic change on Kikaktaruk Herschel island in the Yukon Territory in Northwest Canada, in and around the tundra biome. Islay returned to the Arctic in 2019 with the greening Arctic project, capturing hot spots of tundra vegetation change at landscape scales. The research is meant to fill in gaps between on the ground ecological monitoring and observations from satellites in space. It is the hope that this project can help predict how plant life will respond to the rapid warming of the Canadian Arctic. We are very pleased to have Isla on the program today. Welcome, Isla.

Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Yeah, it's nice that we could get together and we're connecting with Isla from Edinburgh, Scotland and we're glad you're healthy and well during these days of COVID pandemic. And how has Covid affected your work at the University of Edinburgh?

So in some ways my work has changed dramatically. In other ways it's quite very much the same. So I do a lot of my work sitting at the computer, checking emails, analyzing data, chatting with my students, and in some ways that's all stayed the same. But the big change on the front is we won't be going to the Arctic this summer to conduct our field research. And so we've had to adapt our. Adapt our plans, looking forward quite far into the future. So we're already thinking about how we might need to adapt things next Summer and what this means for the long term data sets that we're collecting.

Yeah, I was going to ask you that if you'd planned to head north this summer. So I guess you were. And that's obviously off for now. So is it a case where you're going, okay, well, next summer and we're going to do even more or stay longer.

We're definitely transferring all the things that we were going to be doing this summer to next summer. And then we're starting to think about what we can do to sort of adapt our work this summer. So we've been talking about doing what we've been branding a remote field season. So we're trying to get into the mindset as if we were going to the Arctic. We're going to be trying to do the same research, but instead working with previously existing data sets and satellite data sets that will be collecting data this summer, but remotely. And then thinking forward to collecting data sets next year that are going to fill in the gaps that we'll be missing after this summer.

Oh, interesting. Yes. You can compile some of those things which may lead you to even look at some different things than you might have if you hadn't had that all compiled ahead of time.

Exactly. And I'm trying to see it as an opportunity to do more thinking than sometimes. We tend to get into sort of action mode in the summer and just get out there and collect the data. And now we get this chance to reflect on what do the long term data mean and what are the big questions that we need to be tackling in the future.

Right, right. So you have a very interesting background in relation to the institutions you went to to complete your education, your undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia and your master's at University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ph.D. at the University of Alberta. And now you're at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. What led you on that journey? Was it purely academic or what led you to go to those different institutions?

Good question. So I think if you were to pick sort of one thing that has sort of guided my path is a bit of a seeking out of sort of adventure and then of a desire to understand how particularly climate change is influencing northern ecosystems. So when I started my undergrad, I actually started in Ontario at Trent University and then I switched to ubc and I was studying initially biology, then I went into agriculture and I at that point really wanted to save the world. That was, you know, the sort of young, optimistic approach to life. And then I got a little bit jaded and realized maybe I wasn't going to be able to save the world food crisis. And so I sort of shifted a little bit and thought maybe I should be investing my time in sort of answering my curiosity about how the world works. And then I think I sort of tried to bring the two together by thinking about climate change and how it influences the biology of ecosystems. And I remember a specific conversation I had with a supervisor of mine back at ubc, and I asked her, you know, if you could start your graduate degree over again, where would you go? And she said, I'd go to Alaska. And I was like, that sounds good. I should go to Alaska. So it was partially just a sort of adventure. I thought Alaska and the north seems intriguing. Headed up to Alaska, fell in love with those ecosystems and this question of how warming is influencing vegetation around the Arctic and in the boreal forest and having vaccines.

And now you're in Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, a lot of people may not realize it has a long, rich history of research, doesn't it, around the world?

Yes, indeed. So I should have looked up the date it was founded, but it was a while ago. 1400s or something like that, maybe 1500. And the other thing about the institute that I'm in is it's a global change research institute. So rather than being in a biology department, I actually work surrounded by colleagues who work on all different aspects of global change. And there was also a personal reason I was interested in coming to Scotland, because my father was Scottish. So I think the Scottish decision was a combination of wanting to work in a department where global change was the focus and to get in touch with my Scottish cultural roots.

Yeah, no, that was. That's quite interesting. You mentioned your father being from Scotland. We chatted a little bit earlier about that. Your background is quite interesting, where you were born and where you traveled. Could you maybe just. Just touch on that for our audience?

Yeah, maybe I'll start with the fact that my parents were both biologists for their careers, and so they were in academic institutions, and every seven years they got to go on a sabbatical, so they got to travel to a different place to do their research. And so one year they were on sabbatical to Australia, and that's when I happened to be born. So I started off being born in Australia, then immigrated to Canada just as a baby at 6 months old. Grew up mostly in Vancouver, but went on subsequent sabbaticals with my family to the US and to England. And then my mother was American and my father was Scottish. So I guess I've always had this sort of, you know, being a bit of a citizen of the world. But as a child, my father did research in the Yukon Territory. So my first visit to the field site that I still work at today, I believe was when I was nine years old. And I was sort of inspired by research in the north through my father and my mother also really influenced my research career.

Okay, well, we'll claim you as Canadian because of all that time in Canada.

Sounds good.

Now you have 12 field seasons under your belt. Where have those field seasons been spent? Have they been primarily in the Canadian Arctic?

For the most part, yes. I started off doing fieldwork in my master's degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and that was mostly in interior Alaska. But I also got the opportunity to go up to the north slope of Alaska, to the tundra beyond the tree line there. And then through that master's degree, I got excited about this question of whether shrubs were increasing in tundra ecosystems. And I knew there were folks working on that in Alaska, but at that time, I wasn't sure that it was really a question being answered in Canada. So I set out during my PhD to conduct that research on the Canadian side of the border. And that's when I started focusing my research on the Yukon Territory. And so, yeah, so I think in 2007, I started working in the southern Yukon. And then in 2008, I got the opportunity to go to the Arctic side of Yukon, to Kikita, Herschel island, which is one of our primary field sites now. And it's been quite a journey ever since then.

And what makes Herschel Island? You know, I think your last few or couple of seasons, field seasons have been up there. What has led you to focus on Herschel Island?

So I'll probably call the site Kikitara because that's the word I tend to use. And that word, as I understand it, means the island. And this is the only island on the Yukon Arctic coast. And it's sort of this chunk of frozen mud sitting off the coast there with relatively rapidly eroding coastlines with big thaw slumps. It's a very dynamic part of the Canadian Arctic, and it's sitting right on the Alaska border. So actually, if we think back to my sort of field research career, the first time I went up to the tundra beyond treeline was actually not that far away from Kiki Tark on the Alaskan side of the border. And now here I am working on the Canadian side. And what's interesting about that site, it sits above the latitudinal tree line and at the sort of line of tall shrubs, shall we say? So as you move northward through the Arctic, you have taller trees in the boreal forest, and then those become stunted and more sparse as you hit the latitudinal tree line. And then you keep going, and there's really dense shrubs, shrubs that can be meters tall, and then they become more sparse as well, and eventually the tall shrubs stop growing, and then you're only left with this sparse tundra vegetation that covers the ground. And so Kikktark is sitting at that boundary between where the tall shrubs grow and where the tall shrubs don't grow. And that's an area within the tundra biome. So the area above treeline around the northern part of the world that we expect to see a lot of vegetation change as things warm. And particularly on Kiki Tarik and other parts of the Western Arctic coastline that are really ice rich, the ground there, as the ground thaws, the permafrost thaws, we expect to see changes in the vegetation caused by that disturbance as well. So it's an area of the Arctic where we expect to see a lot of change, and we are seeing a lot of change.

Right. The location is perfect to study that. One thing. You know, even someone like myself who grew up most of their life in the Arctic, you kind of take the word tundra for granted. And, you know, people know, okay, well, the further north I go, the trees get smaller and there's the tree line, and then you have tundra. Maybe just in layman's terms, what exactly is tundra?

Tundra is just, or by my definition, is vegetation. So the plants where trees don't grow above the tree line, and you can get tundra in the Arctic, you can also get tundra at the top of mountains. So when we talk about the tundra biome as scientists, we actually mean both the vegetation growing in the tops of mountains and in the northern parts and theoretically also in the southern end of the planet. So it's this environment that's controlled very much by temperatures. It's so cold that the trees can't grow there. And the plants that do grow there really have a strong adaptation to freezing temperatures, to long periods of snow, long winters, and really, really short summers. And so you have a surprising diversity of plants and other animals in the tundra. I think that's one of the things often we forget about. So there's. On Kiki Tarik, there's hundreds of plant species Maybe in a given area, you'd only have 30, 40, 50. But there's still a huge diversity of life there. And all these different species have figured out how to live with a really harsh winter and a really short summer. And those adaptations are quite fascinating. And it also means that the environment changes as the temperatures warm. Those species can respond because they've been so limited by temperature in the past.

Okay, yeah. Now I'm going to take a bit of a step back. I should have had you explain this for listeners earlier, but. Okay, so you're going from Edinburgh, Scotland, heading over to Herschel island in the Iki Tarrak in the Yukon. So how do you get there? What's your route? When you travel from Edinburgh, what's your route to get to that part of the Yukon?

It can be quite a journey. Yes. So we start here in Edinburgh. We usually get a flight down to London or some sort of stopover flight, and then we aim to get to usually Vancouver, because my mother lives there. And very generously, she allows us to do some of our logistics out of her basement. So we often reconvene as a team in Vancouver, start shipping equipment and our gear up to the Arctic from there, and then we get on a flight to Whitehorse. We do still work at multiple sites each summer. So we go out to the Kluane area in the southern Yukon, check on our experiments out there, test out some of the equipment that we'll be using in the more remote site on Kiki Tarik that we need to make sure it works without an Internet connection, things like that. Back to Whitehorse, up on the milk run flight all the way to Inuvik. Then we do another week of logistics in Inuvik. That's when we buy all of our food and get it all packed up, run through all the equipment again, try and make sure we have every single piece of equipment we need. Because once we get out to the island, there's sort of no going back to the shops to pick up, I don't know, one battery or what have you that might be missing. And then we charter a flight from Inuvik to the island, a Twin Otter plane, usually. And then that takes us out to the field site, and we're relatively remote when we're out there. It's us, it's two park rangers and maybe a few other researchers or other visitors to the island and the local people who are traveling through the area.

Right. It's one of those anomalies where Ikitarok shows up. You know, it's Part of the Yukon, but in many ways he used to get there from Northwest Territories by going to Inuvik. So it's just interesting how that trip goes. I think for people that hear that now, when you give your presentations, you speak of many different pieces of the puzzle in the Arctic that are changing. And one of these is the sea ice. And could you maybe just touch on the changes that you've seen since you've been going up to Iki Tarok in the sea ice? What's happening over the last 30 years? How would that different from what was happening before? How would that be different?

Yeah, so I've been working on Kekita Ark since I think the first summer I went there was 2008. And so the amount of sea ice change that I've seen is probably limited in comparison to what the local people are observing in the region. But generally speaking, what's happened there is that the sea ice is melting off earlier in the season. The blocks of ice are moving off the coast more. So you have this longer and earlier sea ice season. And then in the autumn, the sea ice doesn't reform until quite a bit later. I think it's about a month later in the autumn. And so that means that the sort of sea ice free season has lengthened by a month, a month and a half, potentially two months, depending on the summer. And so what I get to experience, having only been working at the site for a shorter period of time, is the interannual variabation variation. So some years the sea ice leaves earlier, other years the sea ice leaves later. And you can really see how the sea ice being there or not really shapes the way the plants grow and the way the ecosystem and the animals interact. And so what we see in an early sea ice year is that the snow often melts out earlier as well. The temperatures warm up a bit earlier, and the plants green up earlier than they do in a year when the sea ice melts later or sticks around or even blows back onto the coast. And you get this interaction between the ice and the water and the climate on land and often the creation of fluids when there's more ice around. So it really does change the weather conditions for us, the researchers, and also for the organisms that we're researching right now.

You talk about, and I think some people may have never heard of the term before, the albedo effect in relation to sea ice. Could you maybe explain that for us and how there's that importance connected to the shrinking sea ice?

Yeah, so ice is, as most of us Know, relatively white. And when you have sea ice, it's white ice sitting over what would otherwise be a quite dark surface, the water. And so when you have a light color and you have heat and light coming in, the light color bounces that heat and light off of that surface. If you have a dark color and the heat and light are coming in, then that gets absorbed into something that's a darker color. So the way I like to think about it is it's kind of like if you, you're on a, I don't know, let's say you're hiking up a mountain and it's a hot day and you have two T shirts, you could choose between the white T shirt and the black T shirt. Which one would you go for? If your plan is to stay cool, you tend to want to go for the white one because it will reflect the sun's heat and keep you cooler. And it's the same with the sea ice. It's basically that T shirt over the top of the planet. And if we remove the white T shirt, we're left with this dark ocean and that ocean can absorb the world's heat. So the albedo effect is only one of the things that's leading to the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet. But it is a key factor and it has these sort of global scale climate implications, but also localized implications like the ice cooling, the temperatures on land nearby and creating fog, etc. So it's a really complex thing. And one thing that we're trying to figure out is how important sea ice dynamics are for the plants themselves, how much it's the sea ice or it's the temperatures in the air that are really controlling the plant responses that we see right now.

One of the other things that seems to be happening on Kiki Tarock is the coast eroding. And I know people in Tuktoyaktuk, which is on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, they're seeing the same thing. And what's causing that and what are the consequences? I guess some of the consequences are obvious of the erosion. But what is the main cause of that erosion? Speeding up, seeming to speed up on the coast?

Yeah, so there's sort of, we think accelerating coastal erosion in the Northwest Territories, on the Yukon Arctic coast, and also on the Arctic coast of Alaska. And these are all areas that have this really ice rich ground, ice rich permafrost that's forming that coastline. So basically the ground is kind of like a big ice cube. And where the ocean meets the land you expose the frozen ground often, and so you have the salt water and the waves directly interacting with this frozen ground. That's mostly ice. And so what used to happen in the past is that those coastlines were protected by the sea ice in spring and in autumn. And so that would prevent the waves from eroding away at the coastline once the sea ice melts off earlier or doesn't return until much later. And particularly, we think in the August, September time frame, when there used to be sea ice reforming and now there isn't. That's also when we often have a lot of storms that impact this area of the coastline.

Right.

And so you get sort of the crashing waves that basically eat away at those permafrost coastlines. It's quite variable. So on Kiki Tarkin, we, as researchers, my own team, Team Shrub, are mostly there to study the plants. But some of the tools that we've been using to study the plants are also useful for studying the permafrost environment as well. So we were actually out at the site flying drones around to map out the COVID of shrubs on the floodplain, quite near to the Pauline Cove settlement, which is the main place where we stay on the island. And. And so we were just flying the drones to get at the plants. We happened to be mapping the coastline, and then we started to notice as we were walking out to our field sites that summer, this was 2017, that the coast erosion that summer was accelerating. So we were seeing large chunks, like chunks the size of a sort of a garden shed breaking off of the coast and being eaten away by the waves over successive days. And then we realized that we'd actually taken a drone survey before this erosion had started to accelerate. So then we continued to take drone surveys across that summer, and we've been conducting them ever since to try and track the rates of erosion along that particular part of the coast.

Right.

And so in that summer, in 2017, we think that in about a month, the coast eroded back about 30 meters. So it's kind of hard to put that in perspective, but, you know, that's pretty rapid. And then the next summer, it stabilized, and it was only eroding at a rate of a few meters. So it is very episodic. But one of the reasons that people are concerned about erosion, particularly along that coastline, is it's very close to the settlement area, and there's a lot of important historical remains there. So you have sod houses of the Inabaluit that are literally being eaten away by the waves right now. And you have the historic buildings from the whaling times. So the oldest building in the Yukon is actually in that site. And as this coastal erosion happens and you get more of these storm surges, with the big storms in the. In the August time frame, we're seeing more flooding at the site as well. And so there's implications of that for how we manage or how the government manages the historic site and for the innovate people.

So the shore would erode under normal circumstances, but it seems like with there being less sea cover, there being sea cover for a shorter period of time in the year, the shore is taking more of a beating, so to speak, from the waves and the climate, which is seeming to rapidly speed up that erosion.

That's right. And maybe only in certain years, but once those coastlines are eroded, they don't really reform in the same way. So it is sort of progressive loss over time.

Yeah, yeah. Now you, as you mentioned, Team Shrub is primarily focused on vegetation and the shrubs. And perhaps before we talk about your seeing with the shrubs and growth, maybe just explain, you know, a little more about. Well, you know, you know what, let's. Let's just actually focus in on that. So on Kiki Taruk, what are you seeing with the shrubs, with the vegetation now that things are getting warmer?

Yeah. So the site itself, Kiki Tark was established as a territorial park in the 1980s. And when they established the park, they did vegetation surveys across the island. And that was really useful as a sort of baseline for us. So in the late 1980s, we have the surveys themselves and we also have photographs that the biologists took of the landscape at that time, focusing on the plants. Often when we're visiting, I don't know, anywhere in the world, we tend to take pictures of people or cool buildings or, I don't know, other. Other things. We forget to take nice detailed pictures of the landscapes, and then when those landscapes start to change, we regret it. So I actually came across some of these photographs. Some of them are on the island in photo albums, which is where myself and my team first noticed them. And then there's more down in Whitehorse and archives in the Department of Environment building. So I sorted through all these photographs and found some of the places I could recognize on the landscape. And we went back and retook those photographs, and it's really amazing how you can see the change visually with your eyes of how these tallish shrubs, they're not that tall, they're about thigh high from a tundra perspective, that's towering. Have really taken over the floodplain part of the landscape there. And so we've been retaking those photographs every year when we're back at the site. And that change has continued to progress. So these floodplain landscapes in the photos that we have were relatively shrub free in the late 1980s and now they're completely dominated by shrubs. And you have to, as you're walking across those landscapes, you're pushing your way through the willow canopies to get by. So that kind of really dramatic change is happening in these wetter parts of the landscape. And the changes on the more headland areas are perhaps more subtle to the eye, but we also see changes there too. And one of the great things about the establishment of the park is they set up a long term ecological monitoring program and they set up long term plots where previously other biologists and now my team take these very detailed records of the plants that are growing there. So I'll sort of explain how it works. We have a quadrat, so a square that's a meter squared, so it's about the size of your coffee table maybe. And we have a pin and we have a frame that we set up over the plot. And the frame has a hundred points made with string. And we drop our pin down at each of the hundred points and every plant that the pin touches, we record what species of plant that was, what part of the plant it was, whether it was the leaf, the stem, etc. Whether the part of the plant that it touched is alive or is dead. And so these very, very detailed records, it takes us two hours to measure 1 meter squared plot. We have 12 of them to measure each summer. Takes a few days of really concentrated effort.

Yeah, patient work, patient work.

But then over time we get this really detailed picture of the plants that are growing there and how that changes without disturbing the plants themselves. And so those data give us this understanding that the vegetation across the island is changing. And what we're seeing is an increase in the plants and a decrease in bare ground, the island. And we're seeing an increase in the grasses and the sedges and also the shrub species and potentially a decrease in some of the other species. So overall, yeah, there's changes in not just the shrubs and basically the surface is getting greener with more plants.

Yeah, I was going to say.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say you use drones a fair amount in your research. It's really interesting, you know, since the introduction of drones, it allows you to have a different vantage point and so on. So I would imagine just what you're saying around, you know, the. What would I would term as the green plants taking over more and getting taller. You must have quite a different perspective when you take pictures from the drones of green where there used to be brown or different colors of vegetation.

Yeah. So the original motivation for the drone work was we have another way of sensing change in these systems, and that's from way out in space and the satellites that are circling the planet. So the satellites are taking these images of the surface of the entire planet. And when we look in the Arctic through the different satellite data sets that have been collecting data for a while, we see this greening of Arctic ecosystem so that the landscape appears to be getting greener. And the assumption was it must be the plants that are increasing that are causing that increase in green. But what was kind of missing were the. So we had, we had the plot level data on the ground suggesting that plants are increasing. But what was missing was something in between where we could link the very detailed plant measurements to the big satellite pixels that are really synthesizing a signal across a large area. And so that's where we thought, as drone technology was advancing, this would be the tool that would allow us to link what the satellites are seeing to the vegetation monitor on the ground. So about six years ago, we started working with drones at that site. And there's a steep learning curve to drone based ecology. It's a lot more technical than the other tools we often use. But, yeah, I think we got the hang of it now. And so we've been adding to the ecological monitoring on the island by collecting these drone surveys. And they tell us about how the plants are changing, how the bare ground is changing, how the coasts are eroding, how the permafrost is thawing. And we can put all of that information together and understand what's going on in the footprint of a satellite pixel that might be hundreds of meters across, the size of a city block or the size of a football field. And we can get it down the sort of resolution of the imagery to potentially the individual leaf of a plant. So it really allows us to bridge these scale gaps in the data. And we're still working on some of that work and doing those analyses this summer. Now that we can't get back to the. But basically we're finding that there is at our site a correspondence between the vegetation change we're seeing on the ground and what the satellites are seeing. But it's not as clear at every site around the Arctic. And one of the things we're trying to do is get different teams to be collecting similar types of drone monitoring of their systems and the other data sets so that we can actually make the kind of comparisons we can on Kiki Tark across many sites around the Arctic and get a picture of what's happening at the tundra biome scale and then really clarify what is that satellite signal of greening and how much of the green that the satellites are seeing are actual plant change on the ground. Because the other thing that could be going on is that satellites are really picking up the snow melt dynamics in these systems. So as the snow melts, you have these patches on the landscape that would be white. And as those patches get smaller, you're exposing the green surface underneath them. And from a satellite perspective, that looks like greening, even if it's not the plants actually increasing on the ground. So there's those and many other factors that could be a part of the signal that the satellites are picking up.

Okay, so you're kind of pulling all those pieces of the picture together so some conclusions can be drawn the more data you get. Now, you made an interesting comment about the other researchers in the Arctic. And, you know, that's one of the things you're noted for, is making these great connections with these other groups that are doing their work across the Arctic. Is there any. Have you been able to draw any preliminary conclusions comparing the work between the different groups around? Are the same things happening? Is it dependent on the, you know, the different systems in the other parts of the Arctic?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a big believer in collaborative research and collaboration in general, and I think we can do so much more as a team than we could ever do as an individual. And on Kiki Clark, our research is a collaboration between us and the other research groups that are out there, like the Alfred Wegener Institute, who are studying the permafrost on the island. It's also a direct collaboration between us and the rangers who are working for Yukon parks and the government scientists that are working there, et cetera. So even just the work on Kiki Tarrak is definitely the work of a team. And then as we start to team up with groups around the Arctic, yeah, just what we can achieve is so much greater, and I've been very lucky. So during my PhD, I was first introduced to this collaborative style of research through the International Tundra Experiment. So this was a experiment funded a while ago now, 30 or 40 years ago, at sites around the tundra biome, where the experiment was to Put a little greenhouse over the tundra and see how the plants responded to those warmer environments. And so some of those site level studies have now been running for three, 30 decades or three decades, 30 years. And so we've got this really longer term experiment of how tundra plants respond as things warm. And we can compare that to the change we're seeing over time when we don't have the experiments. Well, so that was my first foray into collaborative research. And then I got my hands wet with it all doing my postdoc where I got a bunch of different researchers who were looking at tundra shrubs around the Arctic and particularly using their growth rings. So trees have tree rings, shrubs have shrub rings, and you can look at the shrub rings to get a feeling for how much a shrub grew in a given year and how related that was to the conditions around that shrub in that year. So we looked at the climate sensitivity of shrub growth from sites all around the Arctic and found that at many sites around the Arctic, shrub growth is very climate sensitive. So that gives us an indication that the increases in shrubs that we are seeing might indeed be due to warming. And then we've moved on from there to look at various other data synthesis things. And the drone component is just the sort of latest in those collaborative efforts. And yeah, every data set, cross site data set that we get together allows us to get a better understanding of whether the changes we're seeing are just at one particular site or whether there's something that's really broad scale across the tundra biome.

So just an amazing use of a relatively new technology to enhance the research you're doing. That's really, really, really interesting about the use of drones. Now, again, looking at Kikiktaruk in particular, there's slumping that's happening. And I understand that on Kikktaruk it is quite extreme in some parts. Could you maybe speak about that a little bit, what slumping is and what you've seen there?

Yeah, so I was telling you about how ice rich the ground is in this area. So depending on exactly where you're looking at, it could be up to 90% just frozen water beneath your feet when you're walking around out there. So you have this island that's basically an ice cube and it's protected that ice by the thin layer of tundra plants above it. But if that tundra layer gets disturbed in some way, then that ice gets exposed and it starts to. The ice starts to melt, the ground starts to thaw, and what you can end up with is what is called a retrogressive thaw slump. That's the fancy word. But we per frost slump or thaw slump instead. It's a bit of a mouthful. And so what that is like is you have this little disturbance that starts to thaw the permafrost, and it becomes like a little bite out of the tundra, I would say. And then along the edges of that, you have the sort of wall of ice exposed, and that thaws back at a relatively rapid rate. And probably initially it would just be centimeters or maybe a meter a year. And then it starts to be, I don't know, five or ten meters a year. And. And then slowly over time, that bite out of the tundra landscape gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So the. The biggest thaw slump on Kiki Tark is. It's called the very original name of Slump D, because A, B and C slump, and it is about 2 km across at the widest point. And the sort of wall of ice at the backside of it is about, I think, 35 to 40 meters tall. And it's thawing back into the landscape by about 16 meters a year at the moment. So we believe that it's the second largest thawed lump in the Canadian Arctic. The biggest one is the one that's sometimes known as Big Tuck, I believe, on the highway south of Inuvik. And it's a pretty dramatic feature, and it's just one of several pretty large.

So would that be like the coastal erosion? Would that be a case where maybe slumping has been happening for quite some time? However, as things get warmer, the slumping is happening faster and more dramatically.

I think that's what we think is going on. I mean, Kikktarak always had a fair bit of this disturbance, and through you can actually see because it disturbs that tundra surface, and it takes decades, if not hundreds of years for the plants to grow back. So if you look at aerial photographs or drone imagery of the island, you can see where the slumps used to be, and then they stabilized and the plants grew over them again. So we know that there were these large slumps in the past, but the question is, yeah, is the slumping happening faster in the modern day? And it's a complex. As with the coastal erosion, it's a complex variety of factors that explain when slumping happens more slowly versus faster. It's got to do with the ice in the ground, the stability of the ground, how much of that ice wall is exposed. He sort of heat from the sun, but also Rain and snow patches insulating things and a variety of different complexities. But overall, I'm not the permafrost expert, but I think we're seeing more change in recent years on Kiki Tark, especially in some of those really big slumps.

Yeah, yeah. So I suppose, I mean, at its potentially worst or most dramatic, you have the shore eroding, you have slumping happening, everything happening faster. That could not bode well for, you know, the future of Kikktaruk, I suppose. And it does hold a lot of history. And the Inuvialuit still will travel there because it is a very traditional area. So does that pose any long term danger to the entirety of the island itself?

I think the island itself will be there for many years to come, but particularly how humans interact with that island might change. So I talked a bit about the Pauline Cove settlement and how we've been seeing a lot more flooding in recent years. And previously what they would do with the flooding and the change in the coastline is they'd move the buildings to higher ground, but there's actually no more higher ground left to move buildings to out on the spit. So that's, I think, quite a pressing question for how to manage the island. We're seeing some of the historical remains, like the sod houses, they're eroding away completely. And yes, some of those changes are going to be very permanent. I think for the inevalit people who have a long term perspective on this place. I think change in a sense has always been a part of their lives and it's been a real privilege to get to be out there on the island, to meet local people and hear their perspective on the change. They're very aware of how rapid the change is right now, but I think they also have the ability to put that change into context and adapt. And so, yeah, particularly the last couple years there's been youth and elder programs on the island when my research team has been out there and it's been such a privilege to get to talk to both the elders and the youth about their perception of change and for us to share our scientific data on the change that's going on and then hear their much longer perspective.

Yeah, and I was going to ask you, yeah, I was going to ask you about that. In particular your interaction with the elders and what they are seeing. I mean, you know, you have a people who are so in tune with the land and the history of the land and what have you learned from them? You know, when you've been studying the shrubs and Looking historically, what's happened there? What are some of the learnings you've taken away from the Inuvialuwit?

Yeah, I've had many very meaningful discussions with people about plants and climate change and I think those discussions vary broadly from very specific things. Like I've learned which plants are edible on the island and where certain plants grow all the way up to very big picture discussions about how climate change has progressed over the last few hundred years in that area and what that might mean. And it's really been a dialogue both ways, which is very, again very, very much a privilege for me. So that they're very interested in the scientific findings that we're coming up with and I'm very interested to hear their interpretations of those findings and those data with the ranger teams on the island. Most of them are inevaluate and they're out there living with a sort of like there for the scientific data collection each day. So they're actually extremely scientifically literate. And a recent paper that we had come out in, or came out in 2019 was a collaboration. So some of the co authors are from the ranger teams. So they were actually working with us to interpret the data, they collect some of the data. So they're responsible for collecting the phenology data. So that's the timing of when the plants leaf out and flower. So yeah, it is this collaboration and last summer we were conducting interviews with some of the elders on the island and trying to capture their thoughts on the vegetation change and the climate change. And it's a bit of an interesting question I think, of how we should integrate all of that thinking because as a scientist I'm used to publishing my research in scientific papers, but I'm not sure that's always the best venue for all the different knowledge coming together. So we've been thinking about video content and other ways of really integrating the knowledge and that's still ongoing I would say, but I think for me one goal is to not to make sure that the scientific data collection itself isn't exclusionary to anyone and that we can share not just our big picture take home messages, but also the details of the data we collect with anyone who wants to use them and then also that, that we're open to interpretations that other people can provide on what the changes that we're observing with our data sets mean to the bigger picture. So it's definitely a back and forth there.

Yeah. And that that collaboration is so important because I think historically there wasn't that collaboration between, you know, scientists and the local people. So there's a bit of a distrust I think that existed, you know, in the past around scientists that were visiting the area and never really spoke to the local people. So I think that's so important. Fantastic to see and so good of, you know, your team Shrub to be doing that as they work ahead. So good to see.

Yeah. And one of the challenges as a scientist is you want to set up a long term relationship with the people that you're working with who are local to that area. But we don't always know whether we're going to get funding to come back the following year. We're sort of working on at the moment a year to year basis with our research. And so I feel like I've been really lucky because when I first visited kktr I didn't know I would be back ever. I thought it was just a one off trip, not in 2008. And now we've been there for over a decade and so it's turned into a longer term relationship. But I don't know for sure whether I'll be able to keep working there a decade into the future. So my hope is that this is a long term collaboration and I think the collaboration will get deeper and more meaningful over time.

You bet.

But I hope I can maintain to keep visiting that site yet, both to deepen that collaboration and also to just keep the long term data collection going. And that's definitely the sort of COVID situation has made me think about that. So this will be a summer where none of the ecological monitoring data probably will get collected. So it'll be a little gap in that time series. But you know, as long as we can get back in future years, we can pick up again and it won't be a big deal. But if at any point the ecological monitoring program has to stop because the people can't get out to the site to conduct the research, then we lose one of. You know, there aren't that many long term time series of how tundra ecosystems are changing over time across the Arctic. So this would be one of the, you know, really good ones where we have different data sets being collected across decades and it would be a shame to see that.

Oh you bet. Yeah. For many perspectives would be a shame, you know, most definitely. And now with the shrubs and the growth changing, you know, on Kikktarok, what are you seeing with the animals are. Because there's, you know, more vegetation, so taller vegetation, different types growing faster. Are there perhaps some animals that didn't used to Be there, Are there, or animals that historically have been in a higher population going down. What are you seeing in that regard?

Yeah, so on the island, it's kind of an interesting place because in the wintertime it would be connected to the mainland by the sea ice. And so various animals can access the island in wintertime. And then the sea ice melts, and then they're a bit trapped there. The one side of the island is relatively close to the mainland, so some animals can make the swim in the summertime, but others are kind of stuck with their decision to spend the summer on the island. So the numbers of animals sort of fluctuate a bit depending on who made it over to the island before the sea ice melted. So that that local site, it's a little bit hard to say how the vegetation change is maybe influencing the animals themselves. But if we broaden it up to sort of the picture in the Western Arctic, just as we're seeing the shrubs increasing at sites around the Arctic and Western Arctic and potentially seeing shrub vegetation moving a bit northward, we're also seeing animal distributions change. So one of the sort of obvious ones for many people in these areas is a movement of moose northward north of the tree line and into these more shrubby areas of the tundra. Movement of beaver, also sort of up in Alaska over the Brooks Range and into the tundra as well. And there's questions about how those different species moving northward would influence other animal species. So what we know is that, say, moose love to eat willows and these shrubs that are increasing, so they probably quite like a shrubby or tundra. And one of the less clear questions is what species like caribou think if the tundra gets really shrubby. So in certain times of year, certain caribou populations are dependent on being able to access lichen through the snow. And it looks like as tundra ecosystems get particularly shrubby, that can actually shade out some of those lichen species and potentially lead to lichen declines. So I would say the. The jury's still out on exactly how caribou might be impacted by vegetation change. But it's certainly something that we should be thinking about because the vegetation communities are changing and, and these animals do depend on. On different plant species at different times of year to carry out their life cycle. So.

So, you know, there's so much change happening, and of course, in the Arctic, it's happening faster than other regions of the planet. Should people be panicking? As a citizen of the world, people are going, well, what can I do? And so on Is it too early to draw total conclusions about how quickly this is going to happen or how alarmed we should be, or what we should do? What would you say to people who are going, oh, God, it sounds like things are changing so fast. Are we doomed? Or, you know what, what exactly do we do about this?

Yeah, so I think the Arctic is warming more than any other part of the planet. And so we should expect there to be more changes as that warming progresses, particularly because life in the Arctic is just sitting on that threshold between things being frozen and thawed each summer. Like the temperature is such a driver of life in the Arctic and in tundra ecosystems. And so we shouldn't be surprised that as things warm, plants and animals will respond and permafrost will thaw, etc. But I would also say that the Arctic is a very dynamic ecosystem. Change has always been a really big part of life in the Arctic for plants and animals and for people. So there is a huge resilience to change built in because of that. So should one panic? Maybe not. Because it could be that Arctic peoples and Arctic plants and Arctic animals are best able to deal with change because of how they have dealt with the really cold conditions for so long. That being said, there are some potential points of concern. So one of the things, so we talked about how on Kiki Dark and in the Western Arctic, it's ice rich permafrost, a lot of it is ice, but the other part of the ground is organic matter, so basically frozen plant parts from the past, which is basically frozen carbon. And so as the permafrost thaws, one of the things we're concerned about is whether carbon is getting released to the atmosphere, either as carbon dioxide, CO2 or as methane, which are both greenhouse gases. So as things thaw, we could be releasing more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which could accelerate climate warming for the planet as a whole. But also as the vegetation is responding and the plants are increasing, they're drawing more carbon into the system. So there's some sort of balancing act going on there. And right now we don't totally know whether more carbon is getting released or whether the plants are able to offset that release of carbon by capturing more carbon in these systems. So it's definitely a dynamic environment. I feel, as a scientist, my job is to try and track the change as best as I can, to make predictions for local people and for managers and for the planet as a whole about what type of change we might see and what the impacts of that change might be. But as an individual Citizen. And I think all of us should be doing our best to try and, either through how we vote or through our own life choices, to try and limit the impacts. Both in the Arctic, but everywhere. But I think the main message for people around the planet is the changes that we're seeing in the Arctic do impact the planet as a whole through these climate feedbacks. So they are really, really important.

Yeah, that makes perfect, perfect sense. Biggest surprise, when you've been up, when you've been out in the field, or maybe one of your closest encounters with wildlife or a situation you put in, what would be some memory that just jumps out at you from your work out in the field.

Wow. There are many, many memories. It's hard to pick just one. I think just generically speaking, to start off with, that's one of the reasons I love doing the fieldwork, is that every day is a surprise. It can be sort of less frightening. Surprises like you're walking along the beach and you see a pot of beluga surfacing beside you. A really beautiful sunset. Those little moments that can be beautiful and powerful. There are many sort of wildlife interactions. We are in a part of the Arctic where there's grizzly bears and polar bears. And so sort of safety is a big component of the work that we do. And keeping an eye on the horizon and just being really aware of the wildlife that's around you and whether that's impacting your work. I will pick an example. So last summer, in August, we were meant to be flying off the island. I think it was on the 12th of August, but the weather deteriorated and we were basically in this stormy situation where there were high winds and rain every day for a week. And during that time, so we were staying in the cabins. We weren't going out to the field anymore. Our field season was wrapped up. We just couldn't leave the island. We saw a polar bear in the distance and a grizzly bear at the same time. And then I think a few hours later, we saw five bowhead whales come into the COVID right in front of us. So I was able to stand on the shore and be about. I think it was 20ft from a bowhead whale in the lashing wind and rain. That was a pretty magical moment that I couldn't really take a picture of because it was way too wet for a camera. So there are these moments that happen every summer that remind me of why the Arctic is such a magical place and want to get back there as soon as I can.

Yeah. So speaking of that, plans are now set for 2021 would be the next trip up.

That's right. Yeah. So hopefully we can translate our plans to next summer and we'll see how the situation progresses. But obviously our first priority would be to make sure that Arctic communities are safe. So if we can't come back next summer, we'll find a way to keep doing the remote field work and then be back when we can.

Yeah. It'll make you appreciate the time in the field even more. I guess absent makes the absence makes the heart grow fonder and I guess the same as in this case. Well, thank you so much for making the time to chat with us today. Really appreciate it. We've been chatting with Dr. Meyer Smith and take care. Thank you very much for being with us.

Thanks very much. It's been great.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Arctic the Culture Cure. For more information about my novels or to inquire about my presentations, please Visit my website, www.robertfagan.com. we'll join you again on the next episode of Arctic the Culture Cur.