Ecohydrology of the Northern Alaska Foothills

As part of our long-term NSF support for climate change research at Toolik Lake, AK, we have been studying how experimental thawing of permafrost and deeper snow is altering the water sources and leaf-level gas exchange for plants with different life histories (i.e. shrubs and graminoids). These studies are using the natural variation in the d18O and dD of precipitation at Toolik Lake and involve plant water extractions and isotopic analysis of d18O and d13C in leaf tissue.