Lakeland PBS presents: The Marcel Experimental Forest, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

We value the habitat for wildlife.

We value just a walk in the woods or the ability to go out and put your canoe in the water or get sap from maple trees throughout the year.

One of the main goals of having an experimental forest, and so many of them, and having them spread across the country, is that you can look at, well, "How does the forest type vary?

How does the climate in which the forest is growing, how does that affect things that we're interested in, whether it's timber production or whether it's recreational values, or some other ecological knowledge that we can derive from those landscapes?"

My name is Steve Sebastian.

I'm a research hydrologist with the USDA Forest Service, based out of Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

We are really fortunate to have these gems of research sites across the nation.

In the Forest Service, these areas that are set aside for research are called experimental forests.

There's about 80 of them in total.

What that means is we measure a lot of things and we measure them at the same place again and again and again so that we can create records of what has happened in the environment.

For example, how much has the air temperature increased in recent decades or over the last 50 years, or what is the timing of snowmelt.

When do we first start seeing snow?

How much water leaves the landscape and when does that occur?

Does it mostly occur in summer or does it occur during springtime, at the peak of snowmelt?

We can start to get that basic ecosystem information by making these measurements.

My name is Randy Kolka I'm a research soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station in Grand Rapids, Minnesota and I co-manage both the Marcel Experimental Forest and the SPRUCE experiment on the Marcel Experimental Forest.

Marcel Experimental Forest goes back to around 1960 is when it was established, the first measurements were taken.

So we're getting up to 65 years of data collection now, which is unheard of on the planet.

Back in the day, when we established the Marcel Experimental Forest, these ecosystems were relatively unknown.

There's very little known on the planet and so that's why Marcel was established within the Forest Service group of experimental forests, to better understand these peatland ecosystems, some interesting and unique ecosystems in this part of the world, but there was no long-term research site.

There was no research site that was focused on those peatlands, yet they play such an important role in the landscapes.

They store water.

They store chemicals.

They store carbon.

They store a lot of carbon.

One peatland on the experimental forest where we've done the measurements stores 11,000 metric tons of carbon.

Now, that's equivalent to something like 120,000 regional flights from an airport in Bemidji or Duluth down to the Twin Cities.

So all those emissions are stored in this one landscape component.

Peatlands cover 3% of the land surface area of the planet.

So it's not that much, but they store about a third to half of the soil carbon scores of the planet.

So, a little bit of the area but a whole lot of the carbon is stored there.

My name is Andrew Hill.

I'm currently an ecologist with the U.S Forest Service.

So, today, we are standing at a site called Bog Lake Fen.

This is one of the peat bogs in the forest here.

It's a central site where you're lower in elevation.

It receives a lot of the runoff and drainage from the forest uplands.

It's a very carbon-rich site, so they're very important to understand and to monitor, especially when we have changing environmental conditions taking place over decades.

And we can monitor that carbon and how it's changing how it's coming in and out of the ecosystem.

Since they store such a vast quantity of carbon, it's really important to understand the processes that are driving those changes.

So, at this particular site, we're measuring a water vapor exchange.

We're studying carbon dioxide exchange and also methane.

All 3 of those gases are important greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

A system like this is very important for studying that.

It has a very high resolution of measurement, around 10 hertz or 10 times per second.

We take a gas concentration and also a 3-dimensional wind component that tells us which direction that gas concentration is coming from.

So up here, on the tower, we have a whole bunch of different instruments.

First and foremost is our sonic anemometer here.

That's going to be measuring wind direction in 3 dimensions and speed.

We have our CO2 analyzer.

That's measuring both CO2 and water vapor concentration in the air.

And then this big guy here is measuring methane concentrations.

And that's especially important in a system like this that experiences a lot of water logging and low oxygen concentrations in the sediments because those are the conditions that promote methanogenesis and allow methanogens to thrive and produce methane.

So methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.

It's anywhere from 28 to 30 times more potent than CO2, if we consider the warming potential in the atmosphere.

So, while these sites are very important and great for storing carbon that's been taken up by plants through photosynthesis, so these plants are using sunlight and air and they're taking up CO2 and they're fixing that into sugars.

And over time that is deposited into the sediments as the plants die every year and decompose and go into dormancy.

However, there's a flip side to that, and that is there's also methane that's produced.

So there's bacteria in the soil, little microbes that basically use this organic matter, and they thrive in a low oxygen condition.

We are interested in monitoring both CO2 and how that's changing as well as methane and the rate at which that's released.

So, currently, we're seeing that this site is a net sink of CO2 over the annual course.

However, it is a source of methane.

So it's really important to understand some of the drivers and the processes that are controlling that methane release so we can make predictions and estimations for what we might see in the future.

It was from the initial measurements made at the Marcel Experimental Forest, and other areas across Northern Minnesota, that this became put on the map.

So you make the measurements.

Scientists publish the results, and other scientists were shocked and surprised by how much methane was being released in northern Minnesota.

Now what that does is it spurs on folks.

It gets them asking questions, "Well, what's happening elsewhere?

What's happening in Siberia, or what's happening in Canadian peatlands, or Scandinavia, where these peatlands are across the globe?"

They go out and they make the same measurements and you start to put together a bigger map, and that's starting from one site in northern Minnesota and then being repeated elsewhere until we have the information to tell us how much methane is naturally being emitted from these peatlands.

And now, as we're realizing more and more the consequences of warming of the climate, it puts it into perspective because now, not only can we say what it was, but how it's changing and how will that be a feedback on global climate too.

And so, we're a lot of first, a lot of firsts at Marcel.

Our history of the scientists here in Grand Rapids has been really thinking out of the box and into the future, all the way back since the 60's, thankfully, and it puts us in a position today to be able to house an experiment like SPRUCE, basically.

I'm Paul Hansen.

I'm a corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a department of Energy Facility in Eastern Tennessee.

But I am the principal, or I like to say coordinating investigator, for the SPRUCE project here in Minnesota-- The Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment, that's the acronym for SPRUCE--was set up because the department of energy was particularly interested in how peatland carbon stores, how will they remain.

Will they change?

What forms of carbon might be lost from them as climate warms?

And so we came to our partnership with the U.S Forest Service with DOE funds to build an experiment that would give us an answer for a whole range of warming conditions: about how peatland vegetation, peatland microbial systems, and the carbon that's stored in the peat would respond across that temperature range.

The Department of Energy and Oak Ridge National Lab communicated with us that they were thinking about doing a peatland experiment, about 2009 is when all this started.

From there we wrote a proposal together.

We sent it out to the scientific community, globally, experts around the globe on peatlands and biogeochemistry and some other things, and, by and large, the community loved it.

And so that was the energy that the department of energy needed to go forward with SPRUCE, basically, and so we had a lot of meetings with publics and various folks, and we did NEPA and, you know, cultural resources.

We went through the whole process with the Chippewa National Forest, who was critical in all the environmental assessments with us, great partners.

And by the winter of 2012-2013, we had the go ahead, and that's when we built the boardwalks out there.

And the winner of 2013-2014, we built the chambers--above ground and below ground chambers--and then that summer of 2014 we turned on the below ground warming aspect of SPRUCE, so the experimental infrastructure was all in place by the end of winter 2014.

We turned down the above ground warming in 2015 and the elevated CO2 in 2016.

We did that in phases to maybe look at the individual effects.

So there was various treatments on these ecosystem properties of the peatlands, and then in 2016, we were at the full experiment then, and the plan was to run it for 10 years.

And so our last field season is 2025, so just a few years away now.

So the 5 treatments are a constructed chamber with no energy added, so that's effectively our control.

It's our conditions the way it is today except that we had to build a structure around it to make the the warming system work.

And then we have one that's, in centigrade, 2.25 degrees above that 365 days, 24/7, and then another one at 4.5 degrees Celsius, 6.75 degrees Celsius, and as much as 9 degrees Celsius.

On that high end, that's about 15 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit, but then these treatments operate in deep soils and in the air in our enclosures 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, every day of the week.

SPRUCE now includes hundreds of researchers.

There are several of us in the Forest Service.

There are many scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but we have many other partners.

And it was from the design of the Field of Dreams, "build it and they will come."

If you're going to build a unique big experiment with lots of infrastructure, accommodate every type of science that you can.

So I'm a research hydrologist.

I study water, water chemistry, and how things that we do to landscape affect the the amount of water that's available at certain times or across a year.

That's a pretty narrow field.

It's an important part.

So I do 1 particular science.

I've got a partner who helps with that a lot, based out of Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

But then what about tree growth, shrub growth, plant community changes, changes to the timing of the biological event?

So, when did the blueberries flower?

When do they put on fruits?

Is that changing?

When do the tamarack put on needles?

They're a deciduous conifer, so they lose their needles every year.

They regrow them.

But, will the timing of that change?

And how does that relate to other things that we're interested in?

Because the more we can address with one experiment, the better off we're going to be with having basic understanding, with being able to take this information and then turn it around into computer models that then allow us to think about, "What if this changes?

Oh, that could be the response.

But what if this changes?"

And then you take the scenarios, too, where 20 things change, and you're able to feed that into these models and start getting answers to what might be going on, just based around how is warming and how is elevated carbon dioxide affecting the ecosystems.

You can see in the background here that we've got some chambers that will be deployed, now that winter is departing for the year here, to measure the flux of gases from the bog.

So these chambers behind me will be deployed among our treatment enclosures, that exist out on the Marcel Bog, to measure about 4 times an hour.

Those chambers will go up and down and they'll measure the release of carbon dioxide gas and methane gas from the peatland and the organic and root matter that's beneath them, and that information over time will be added up, modeled, and it will give us a picture of the annual interchange of carbon either going in through photosynthesis or out through respiratory or anaerobic release processes to the atmosphere.

Those 2 gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are important greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so understanding how the peatland takes them out of the atmosphere or projects them back into the atmosphere is important to understanding natural carbon cycles in northern Minnesota, but also worldwide in similar ecosystems.

And that becomes a key component because how the natural system responds in its carbon cycle has a lot to do with how we might have any effect on fossil fuel carbon cycles.

So one of the things with these ecosystem experiments, the enclosures are humongous from an experimental point of view, from a science point of view.

No one has ever attempted to build chambers of this size that are doing warming both above and below ground in any ecosystem, not just peatlands.

Never been done before.

But they're still relatively small in regards to the peatland area that they represent.

The peatlands would become disaster zones with 100 people working in them every summer or every field season, and so we control a lot of that and one of the things that we also control is the soil sampling.

These chambers, these enclosures, would look like swiss cheese if we let everyone sample soil when and where they wanted to.

And we can't have that because the real estate is so precious.

So pretty much annually we have a soil sampling event.

The coring event involves taking a device called a peat auger and screwing it down into the bog in one direction.

And then, once you get to the depth increment you're of interest, you start going counter-clockwise.

Beneath the ground, a door closes around a chamber that allows you to bring up a section of peat, and then that peat, by depth, is sampled and passed on to people that are interested in the element contents in the bog, microbial communities at depth in the bog, root particles and pieces that might be variation varying with depth, as time goes by.

It's quite the party.

We get everyone on the planet comes up, and we all get in a line.

It's like a conveyor belt based on who needs the samples first and how they need to preserve them.

It's all very detailed and worked out.

But basically we take the peat samples down to about 2 and a half or 3 meters, so 15 feet--10, 12, 15 feet-- and then each group takes their sample out of that to bring back to their laboratory, wherever it is, and Twin Cities or Tennessee or Florida or Sweden, wherever, there's so much room for engagement.

We work with, you know, universities, graduate students courses being taught at ecologist too.

The young, bright minds who are pursuing graduate degrees or undergraduate degrees, they come.

They work with us.

There's plenty of opportunities to be engaged that way.

I'm Bella Garrioch and I study environmental studies at Macalester College.

I was in a class last semester called "Earth's Climate System" and we were talking about atmospheric science.

That's what the class was about.

And then my professor said there is this organization, there's this project called SPRUCE up in northern Minnesota, and it's one of the biggest climate change projects going on in the country.

And I thought, "How, as somebody who's been going to school in Minnesota for this long, never heard about this project."

And so I went up to her after class, knowing that my Capstone was going to be happening the next semester, and I said, "Do you think, if I reached out to them, they would be interested in having me work there?"

And she said, "The worst they could say is no."

I never thought that, as an undergrad who lived this far away from a project like that, that I'd be able to participate.

But I really have and I've been able to work with all of these very cool scientists.

So I think the first thing is don't be afraid to just tell someone you're excited about something and ask how you might be able to fit into that.

It's exciting to me to think about people from a lot of different backgrounds working for a project like SPRUCE and, being a young person, being a woman, whatever that may be, I just want that to even expand more.

And I'd love to get more local people working at SPRUCE, talking about the things that they see.

I think that various backgrounds and diverse backgrounds really help a project experience.

Thinking back on myself as a little kid, I went to an elementary school that was in the forest.

It was in the woods.

And I used to spend all day outside.

And, around the same time, I was starting to get terrified of climate change because I was starting to really understand what it was and what it meant, and I just think that if that little girl who was playing in the creek at her school could see me now, she'd be really proud and also really excited and happy that I'm doing something about something she was scared of.

Our neighbors are engaged.

Our communities and our schools are engaged, which is great.

And there's room for so much more than that.

We're happy to give tours to anybody.

It's your money.

It's your tax dollars.

It's not just university groups, it's all the way from grade schoolers to college students.

I had a men's church group call me and say, you know, "We've heard about SPRUCE.

Could you take us up there and show us?"

And we did.

It's a fun time out there.

Why go through the whole effort?

Why spend all this money?

Why do--I mean it's cool--but why do we need to spend money to do at least some experiments like this?

It's important in the scientific context because the questions people are asking about the future under various greenhouse gas conditions and climate warming are for temperatures that we don't have a record of today.

So we had to produce an experiment that would simulate, cheat, the conditions today.

Give us a glimpse into the future for these various levels of warming.

Because we need some data pieces to say, if it were to get that warm, what would happen.

Without some solid data, we're just guessing.

And so the experimental results put boundaries on how far a modeling projection might go to the to the, you know, up or down, in positive or negative carbon gain.

And so we need those anchor points.

Today, in the current environment in northern Minnesota, year in and year out, you just don't have these levels of temperature change that exist all year long, 24 hours a day, and that's what's different about the experimental treatments.

And they give us a picture of future warming that we can't look back on a climate record or in a weather record and say that's what happened.

You might have hot periods and cold periods from time to time in the weather record, but they're not sustained the way these treatments that we're imposing are sustained all year long, 24 hours a day.

The climate's already changing, we're already up by a couple of degrees at Marcel and Grand Rapids and Bemidji, in this part of the world, since about 1960.

And it continues to increase.

Our summers are longer they are warmer, and what that does is making a longer window for decomposition to occur.

And that longer window for decomposition means that more of the carbon is taken from the plant parts, the organic matter, and turned into carbon dioxide because that's what decomposers do.

We've been storing carbon for 10,000 years in these peatlands and if it's not stored, and we're now reaching a point where we're not accumulating it as fast in most years and we're releasing more back to the atmosphere, so if it's not stored in the peatland, it's got to have some time in the atmosphere.

And carbon dioxide and methane are both greenhouse gases, and that is going to lead to, kind of, that feedback.

If the future is warmer, the sphagnum losses don't like the warming treatments at all.

They're declining and not growing as well in any of the 5 warming treatments that we're studying.

On the other hand, shrubs and trees look like, and then the final answer is not in we've got three more years to operate, it looks like they're taking advantage perhaps of some nutrients freed up because the peat is decomposing.

The peatland will survive, although it might look different.

The long-term history of research has impacted us environmentally in so many ways.

It's hard to even put your finger on it because it comes up all the time.

If you read a paper, like a scientific paper, on peatlands, there's definitely going to be at least 1 or 2 citations from Marcel, because this is where it's happened.

And so getting the data is fun and getting it published, and scientifically, it's all fun.

But what's the impact, you know?

And the impact has been dramatic.

We don't take a position as a federal agency.

We just provide the information.

So that's our job.

What is our resource?

How is it changing over time?

How do the things we do to manage the landscape?

Whether it's intentional, like forest harvesting, whether it's unintentional like pollution or climate change, it's not good to see changes in the peat lens with warming.

It's not good to have more methane being emitted from these.

So we're aware of the balance, but to learn from this, and to have that learning be informative to others, is what we really, really hope is the best product to come from this experiment.

[Music] This program is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money, by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.