Being the responsible persons that we are, Rob and I not only got ourselves down to the lab on Saturday in time to rescue our posters and personal effects, we also managed to be at the conference location in time to do 14 laps around the Van Andel Institute in our efforts to find the (wrong) parking garage to park in.

I expected that the only rewarding thing about a conference was socializing with other people who you’d want to see anyway… and maybe the free food, because how bad could it be? I was then pleasantly surprised to be enjoying both presenting my poster and talking with the other students who had posters to present.  Our conversations were pleasant, informative, and exciting. I was inspired to continue investigating the topic of my poster, since the preliminary data that ended up on the poster only scratched the surface.

I didn’t mean to imply, when I wrote last week, that I did not understand my own research when I confessed that I didn’t have the title committed to memory.  I knew very well what I put on that poster, because I put every bit of it there (nevermind that once it was there Bob was wont to move it around and change this word for that word… in fact, the large pictures were his idea: “Put a giant picture in the middle so people will want to look at it”).

Using the Atqasuk pointframe data and zonation schemes established by other people, I labeled each species of vascular plant that we found at the site as either “high arctic” or “low arctic,” referring to latitude.  High arctic plants can also be found in low arctic zones, but the low arctic species will not be present in high arctic zones.

What we expected to find was that the point frame data would indicate more cover from the low arctic plants in the OTCs.  We were looking for evidence that climate change and warming would catalyse these species in spreading northward.  What the data told us was that in the dry site of Atqasuk, there was less cover inside the OTCs, and at the wet site, there was actually an increase in cover for HIGH arctic species.

Because this was unexpected, there are now a hundred more questions to ask, and there are always more data to analyse. We only used the point fram data from Atqasuk 2007, so the Barrow data that Papasaurus and I collected (and that I entered into spreadsheets!) wasn’t used yet, nor was the data from past years. Once those spreadsheets are run, we can compare them individually and to each other. I might start looking at specific plots and their change over time, rather than lumping all the hits for all high arctic species in all dry control plots together, for example.

Besides THAT, I have been getting more of the books and articles I requested from the library, and I will use them to find other zonation schemes that I can use to classify our species. The classification system we used is relative and somewhat subjective, so it could be that a different zonation scheme will yield different results!

The West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference has the worst acronym of all time, apart maybe from any acronyms that spell out unfortuate words. However, clumsy acronym or no clumsy acronym, I thought it a great success.