She helped establish both sites, the first in Canada, as a graduate student at the University of Victoria in 2006.

Site setup includes creating an inventory of the plants in the test site area and burying temperature loggers to collect soil temperature data.

She is using the same method for data collection as the European researchers included in the Nature study. This ensures the data are comparable for any future reports.

“I didn’t create any of the protocol for the project; I followed their protocol because it is so applicable between here and there,” she says. “When I do come around to doing analysis of the data I’ll be following in their footsteps, keeping it very consistent, making sure we gather all the data so we can do comparable analyses.”

Last summer, Swerhun returned to her sites to replace the temperature monitors and hopes to do a full re-monitoring in 2016. This will include creating a new inventory of the plants in the test site.

Comparing the 2006 and 2016 inventories will show how the plant community changed during the 10-year gap. By comparing those changes with her temperature data, Swerhun will be able to deduce the role climate change played in the transformation.

“This is a pretty unique project,” said Swerhun. “Usually when people do studies it’s over five or ten years and there’s always an endpoint. For this it is really good that there is no endpoint, that we can collect data for a long time. It’s one of the reasons that drew me to the project… the data after 50 years or 100 years will be so much more valuable.”

According to Michael Gottfried, GLORIA program sites around the world will continue to be monitored in the coming years. Eventually the data will be assembled in a global report that will show how climate change affects alpine plant communities around the world.

For a list of other GLORIA program sites in Canada and across the globe, click here.