My arrival in the tundra was three days ago when we float-planed to the remote Polaris field camp in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta (YKD). Flying over the fractal patterns of lakes, different colored vegetation, and burned and unburned areas was like entering a different world. And in a way, we have entered a different world.

For the next two weeks our main goals are to walk around and explore this place, develop personal research questions, collect data, talk with and learn from the people around us, and ask a lot of questions. I think it’s safe to say that, for most of us, a world in which we have the opportunity to do field-based science with a team of incredible peers and mentors is not a characteristic of our normal, undergraduate experiences.

Walking around the tundra the past two days has been an exercise in curiosity and balance. We have all dived into asking lots of questions about types of vegetation we are observing, hypotheses we have about landscape variability, different systems at work, what science equipment we could use to measure different data points, and how to perform different manipulations. We have also all become accustomed to navigating the minute changes in elevation and the soft ground that make walking to different sites an exciting adventure that forces us to practice our balance and patience. 

At this point, most of us are still in the process of clearly articulating our science questions and beginning to map out how we will design an experiment to answer these questions. Field-based science has so far been quite different than the lab projects I’ve worked on. There are so many more factors to consider and the protean nature of this landscape provides a unique challenge to designing an experiment that compares variables across different sites. But this is also the first time I feel like I’m actually doing real science.

With almost two full weeks of field work ahead of us, I’m excited to continue to engage with this place and these people!

— Anneka Williams is a student at Bowdoin College