The 2016 Iceland field season begins

Early May saw Jon, Wyatt Cross, Alex Huryn, Philip Johnson and Jim Hood in Iceland to start the 2016 fieldwork. The first order of business for Wyatt and Jon was to start the phosphorus drippers in our four focal streams. As you can see below, there was still plenty of snow around, so we were setting up inside snow caves in two of the streams.

The rest of the time was spent setting up the streamside channel experiment (now in its third iteration), during which we were joined by Jim's new student, Lyndsie Collis. Predictably, it ended up being a ton of work with plenty of curve balls sprinkled throughout the whole process. Finally, the day after Alex and Jon left, Lyndsie and Jim got the experiment going. It's interesting to compare the set-up with the picture below from 2013. The temperature array is now twice the size and includes a dripper in each of the thirty channels, which contain a total of 3000 tiles. It's a beast.