2005-2006: Proof-of-concept activities

In 2004 and 2005, we characterized vegetation and soils at our first experimental site and designed a trench system for water table manipulations. Trenches were dug to create the the lowered water table treatment in March 2005 while soils were still frozen. The raised water table treatment was initiated in June 2005. APEX collaborators Ron Daanen and Debu Misra were key in designing a datalogger system across all three water table plots that ensures our treatments retain hydrologic variability at the three water table positions. MSU students installed open top chambers in June 2005, and MSU and USGS personnel have maintained environmental probes for continuous measurement of soil temperature, incoming radiation, and water table position across all treatments. We have measured CO₂ and CH₄ emissions weekly or biweekly at this site throughout the field seasons of 2006 and 2007.

Visit our image gallery for more field pictures!

Presentation of APEX Results

The APEX team has presented preliminary results from this experiment at several international scientific meetings, including the Ecological Society of America meetings, the American Geophysical Union meetings, the 5th conference of the BIOGEOMON conference series, and first Peatland and Carbon Cycling international meeting in Wageningen. Click here for a full list of APEX presentations.

Additionally, we have presented results from this experiment in several scientific articles that currently are in the review process. Once these become available, we will post these products here. E-mail Merritt Turetsky (mrt@msu.edu) if you would like more information on our project results so far.