How extreme can environments be before life can no longer hold on? The quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) trees I study seem to cope well with all sorts of extremes – they are found as far north as boreal Canada and as far south as Mexico. Normally when I see an average aspen clone, it looks…

For the past few days I have been testing an infrared camera for a study on temperature variation across environments. My assistant and I have been carrying approximately fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of non-waterproof equipment into the mountains to make some preliminary analyses. This gets interesting when the sun disappears, then wind picks up, the…

When is the snow going to melt? The alpine plants I study will not begin seriously growing until the ground is bare and the soil is unfrozen. I want to examine how the microclimate around these plants changes through this transition and into the growing season, but it’s hard to know what’s going on from…

A stormy few days – snow at high elevation and heavy rain lower down. I have abandoned my alpine project until conditions improve, and have temporarily refocused on a low-elevation aspen study. It proved to be an interesting day in the field, especially after helping a few fellow researchers who were also caught out by…