E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

January/February 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents IPY: What is IPY? IPY: Kluane research station IPY: Inuit health IPY: Arctic mercury mystery IPY: Arctic scientist IPY: Future Arctic research IPY: Multimedia The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Book Reviews

KLRS is known for hearty meals in the mess hall.
Photo: Fritz Mueller

• PHOTO ESSAY
• VIDEO
• INTERACTIVE

Home base: Dig Kluane Lake Research Station’s community vibe
Field Report: An interview with Kluane photographer Fritz Mueller

Lay of the land: Investigating climate change’s impact on the Arctic landscape part 1 and part 2

Caribou country: Follow the caribou’s migration patterns on the tundra

Even on the longest days of the northern summer, the morning sun takes a while to warm the bluffs lining Printers Pass, about 20 kilometres north of KLRS in the Ruby Range. A mug of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal take the edge off the cold as Queen’s University ecologist Ryan Danby and his field assistant Aimée Brisebois prepare for another workday. Juneau, Danby’s yellow Lab, wags his whole body excitedly as they pack lunches and shoulder backpacks. All is quiet except for the shrill “eep!” of collared pikas scampering around this alpine Eden.

Danby is part of a network of circumpolar researchers who collaborated on an International Polar Year (IPY) project investigating changes in the Arctic treeline. His interests are broad and interdisciplinary, which helps explain why he favours the flexibility of a tent to the comforts of a fixed camp. Danby and Brisebois will stay in the pass for four nights before hiking back to KLRS to shower and resupply for their next stint in the field.

Danby first came to this area in 1996 to work on a master’s degree in environmental studies, looking at ways of integrating ecology with park management. He couldn’t have picked a better destination. Prompted by the construction of the Alaska Highway during the Second World War, the Canadian government had set aside a triangle of wilderness in southwestern Yukon as a wildlife reserve. Kluane National Park and Reserve is the 21,980-square-kilometre legacy of this decision. Combined with adjacent parks — Tatshenshini- Alsek Park in British Columbia and Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Glacier Bay National Park in the United States — it forms the world’s largest international protected zone. Noted for many superlatives — it is home to North America’s most genetically diverse population of grizzly bears, for example, and contains the planet’s largest non-polar icefields — Kluane National Park is the research station’s wild backyard.

“I don’t know if there’s a suitable adjective that really describes everything here in one word,” says Danby. “It’s the place, it’s the people … I feel comfortable here.”

A third-generation KLRS alumni, Danby conducted his Ph.D. fieldwork here with University of Alberta ecology professor David Hik, who did his research here with Krebs in the 1980s during a landmark study of boreal forest ecology. From 1986 to 1996, led by Krebs, nine professors from three universities, 26 grad students and 93 assistants and technicians participated in an academic assault on the forest. The star of the Kluane Boreal Forest Ecosystem Project was the snowshoe hare, a keystone species that’s central to the fate of many other animals and plants, but the body of work that emerged from the study was far-reaching. As a large-scale examination of an entire ecosystem — one that circles the globe and remains relatively intact — Kluane’s boreal study has global currency, says Hik. It became a model for ecological research around the world.