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Ignited by a lightning strike on July 16th, 2007, the largest tundra fire ever recorded on the North Slope of Alaska ravaged nearly 90,000ha (220,000 acres), and continued to burn until October, 2007.
Led by Dr.Gauis Shaver, the objective of this project has been to obtain preliminary information about the integrated impacts of tundra fires on terrestrial, stream, and lake ecosystems in the tundra foothills, and to begin documenting the recovery process. This information will be used to develop a more comprehensive plan for scientific investigations of landscape-level disturbances in arctic tundra. This project has obtained Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) funding from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs for logistics costs and for initial sampling of the fire’s impacts. Additional SGER funding will come from the NEON program to test NEON protocols, instrumentation, and remote power setups with a series of flux towers measuring carbon, water, and surface energy balances.
Although the Anaktuvuk River Burn Project is highly multidisciplinary in scope, this website will focus on the component of the project that deals with vertical fluxes of carbon, energy, and water vapor. As such, three eddy covariance (EC) station were established over tundra of varying burn severity during the summer of 2008.