FT 7: Virtual Tour of the SPRUCE Whole-Ecosystem Warming By Elevated CO2 Experiment

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM Pacific

Session Organizer(s)

Paul Hanson

Climate Change Science Institute and Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge, TN, USA

Slides (PDF)

Volunteer(s)

Sachinthani Karunarathne

School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, Faculty of Science, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Session Co-organizers: Misha Krassovski, Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN
Trip Itinerary: We propose a one-hour interaction including prerecorded video tour drone flights, movies of seasonal phenology and instructive slides with brief dialog. These “tour stops” will be interspersed with live audience chat questions and tour guide answers. Participants will begin their tour with an aerial overview of the site and video walk throughs of the warming enclosures. We will engage the audience with seasonal phenology movies of the site as a clear demonstration of the efficacy of the warming treatments and include a video and slide discussion of the full range of measurement approaches used by the SPRUCE working group. Illustrations of key SPRUCE research findings from published studies will also be used to contrast hypothesized responses with actual findings from the SPRUCE manipulations.

The tour will provide all participants a virtual visit to the Spruce and Peatland Response Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) experiment and participate in active discussion of the ongoing research and research findings to date. The SPRUCE experiment is a US DOE-funded complex large-scale temperature by elevated CO2 manipulation study located within an ombrotrophic bog, regrowth forested peatland in northern Minnesota. Participants will get to virtually experience the complexity and size of the SPRUCE experiment via overflights, video walk throughs of the site and warming enclosures, and a combination of video and slide-based discussions of the various measurement systems used to assess microbe-to-tree responses to the manipulations. We will also include a summary of working hypotheses and discussions of the findings of the SPRUCE research group after more than 5 years of continuous manipulations. More details on SPRUCE may be found at http://mnspruce.ornl.gov.