Long-Term Ecological Research in the Arctic: Where Science Never Sleeps

• Main Author: Hobbie, John E.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2016
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Lake; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199380213.003.0015

When the Arctic (ARC) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project began, I was an aquatic ecologist with experience in managing large projects in freshwaters and estuaries and a specialization in microbes. This project, which studies lakes, streams, and tundras, has greatly increased my breadth as an ecologist and allowed me to take part in terrestrial modeling, microbial studies in streams, and the role of soil mycorrhizal fungi in providing nutrients to many species of plants. As a mentor to several postdoctoral fellows, my LTER research has enabled me to learn about other fields such as the application of molecular biology to microbial ecology. The Arctic LTER project data, the long-term field experiments, and the facilities available at the University of Alaska field station brought me in contact with ecologists from many countries. One result of this association with experts was my coauthorship of a book on Arctic natural history aimed at communicating scientific knowledge to scientists and the general public unfamiliar with the Arctic (Huryn and Hobbie 2012). I have always collaborated extensively with many scientists and encouraged collaboration as the best way to carry out ecosystem research. The Arctic LTER project brought many opportunities to broaden the scope of my collaboration to include terrestrial ecologists and microbiologists. My PhD research was about year-round primary productivity of an Arctic lake but while on a postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University, Sweden, I switched to an emphasis on bacterial uptake kinetics in lakes. The techniques I helped develop in freshwater worked in the ocean and estuaries too (Hobbie and Williams 1984). In addition we developed the epifluorescence method for quantifying the abundance of planktonic bacteria. Our paper (Hobbie, Daley, and Jasper 1977) finally convinced oceanographers that bacteria are abundant (at 10⁹ per liter) and important. Recently, I have used my understanding of kinetics of uptake to analyze microbial activity in the soil. My Arctic ...