Sapmi Boazu — A visit to the Sami Reindeer Husbandry Range of Finland

Jackie Hrabok, UAF's Northwest Campus assistant professor of High Latitude Range Management, hosted and led an international cultural exchange for the Alaska Reindeer Directors. Delegates were from Mekoryuk on Nunivak Island, the Kawerak Reindeer Herders Association and the Kawerak Environmental Department.

The goals of the two-week overseas experience Nov. 11-24, 2023, were to interact with the Indigenous Sami and learn about their livelihood as reindeer herders north of 69 degree latitude in Finland. They toured reindeer-specific facilities and had business meetings with key colleagues: commercial slaughterhouses and a tannery, Sami Education Institute Reindeer Husbandry and Applied Arts Departments, reindeer roundups, Kutuharju research herd, and the Finnish Reindeer Herders Association headquarters.

Delegates included Ed Kiokun, Nunivak Island Mekoryuk; Terry Don, CEO of Nunivak Island Mekoryuk; Nathan Baring, director of Kawerak Reindeer Herders Association; and Anahma Shannon, Director of Kawerak Environmental Department.

Delegates have returned home to Alaska with new ideas to increase workforce development, commercial meat sales, and value-added byproduct production, all stemming from the development of the Alaska reindeer industry.

If you want to learn more about Alaska's reindeer industry, check out Part III of Sun and Soil's podcast "Feeding the Last Frontier: A Reindeer Called Rhonda," which features Hrabok. She also lists several books that have excellent information on reindeer. Sun and Soil is produced by C.C. Clark and Noah Spickelmier. You can find it:

IG, FB, TikTok: @sunandsoilpodcast

YouTube: @sunandsoil

email: sunandsoilpodcast@gmail.com

website: sunandsoilpod.com

Agrivoltaics debut at the 2023 Food and Farm Festival

Leaders in agriculture, farming, and cooking convened in downtown Anchorage for the 2023 Alaska Food and Farm Festival. Bookended by two bouts of heavy snowfall, the conference took place on the sunny reprieve during the weekend of Nov. 10-12.

Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension Co-Investigator Glenna Gannon and ACEP Researcher Savannah Crichton attended the festival to build community around a new project, Agrivoltaics: Unlocking Mid-Market Solar in Rural Northern Climates. With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and CleanCapital, the research team includes collaborators from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska Pacific University, and Renewable IPP.

Crichton opened the presentation with the definition of agrivoltaics: the co-use of land for both solar and agricultural production. In the Lower 48, solar farms consist of panels spaced close together, meaning that farming or animal grazing usually takes place underneath the panels.

In northern latitudes, the angle of the sun is much lower, meaning panels need to be spaced farther apart to prevent shading each other. Solar farms with this design, like the new 8.5-megawatt farm in Houston, Alaska, have ample room between panels for crop plots.

Utilizing the state of Alaska’s largest solar farm, the research team will monitor the responses of vegetables, grazing crops, and wild edibles. Crichton said that the same plot of land will sell clean energy to Matanuska Electric Association while also providing the community with fresh produce.

Gannon reviewed the overarching objectives of the research with the crowd: increasing food sovereignty and energy security in Alaska and other northern climates. By involving stakeholders from the inception of the project, community voices provide a grounded understanding of how agrivoltaics may be adopted and the anticipated barriers or benefits.

At the end of their talk, Gannon and Crichton shared a QR code allowing people to sign up for the stakeholder pool. They spent the next few hours engaging with conference attendees, explaining how their organizations or farms could participate and eventually adopt agrivoltaic systems.

From farmers across the state, there is a desire to adopt innovative, renewable systems that could also potentially boost their crop production. For communities, this means strengthening local food systems.

Agrivoltaics research will provide interested parties with agricultural yield data, PV performance data, and a techno economic analysis. These figures will guide the next generation of farmers, utilities, solar industries, tribal entities, and government agencies toward renewable, regenerative growing technologies.

Hazelnuts a new trial crop in Alaska

Self-described "plant fanatic" Josh Smith is behind one of the new crops in both Palmer and Fairbanks: Hazelnuts.

Smith grew up in North Pole and has been growing food his whole life. During his Air Force career, he was stationed in North Dakota, where he noticed farmers growing hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, apricots and pears in conditions that were not so different from Fairbanks.

"I started thinking, wow, there's so much potential in cold climates," he said.

He ended his career at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage and immediately started testing some of the crops he had seen in his travels, including hazelnuts. One of the hazelnut trees at his home in Chugiak is 7 years old. He's also growing walnuts and chestnuts.

“Hazelnuts are one of the most resilient crops you can grow,” Smith said. “They’re drought-resistant, they’re flood-resistant. They’re resistant to cold and heat and every extreme you can imagine."

Hazelnuts are low-growing, bushy trees or shrubs, topping out at about 15 feet. Although plants produce both male and female blossoms, they do not self-pollinate, so multiple trees are needed to produce nuts.

"Not only do they serve as a valuable food source, but there's biofuels, there's oils we can extract from the nuts,” he said. Hazelnuts can also be used in alley cropping, the practice of interspersing perennial crops with annual crops, which could sequester carbon, hold water and reduce erosion.

A North Dakota farmer who has been growing hazelnuts for 30 years in an area with winter temperatures of minus 40 degrees, gave Smith a bag full of hazelnuts, which he sprouted. Some are planted at the Matanuska Experiment Farm, some at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm, and others in various locations in both Southcentral and Interior Alaska.

"I've known (UAF professor emeritus) Patricia Holloway for years," Smith said. "She and I have go back and forth when it comes to talking plants. I ended up mentioning hazelnuts, and realized I had some extras." He asked if Holloway was interested in trying hazelnuts in some of the microclimates around Fairbanks to test their hardiness.

"Some of these could be reliable at Zone 2 or even Zone 1, but the only way we're going to find out is planting a large number of them across Alaska and see what sticks," he said.

Glenna Gannon, assistant professor of Sustainable Food Systems at UAF, and Katie DiCristina, manager of Georgeson Botanical Garden, agreed to plant hazelnuts in the garden, as well in the agriculture field across the railroad tracks and about 100 feet lower in elevation from the garden. Gannon planted the seedlings in late September, nestling the young plants in compost and layering with a frost cloth to protect them as much as possible.

Smith's hazelnuts in Chukiak haven't produced yet, but a friend in South Anchorage has picked ripe hazelnuts from his bushes.

"Part of this is we want to start developing new crops and part of this is we really want to hit the point home that things are changing here in Alaska and my big mission is food security," Smith said. "The fact is you guys don't hit negative 50 every year nowadays, and the fact that your growing season is getting longer, that's opening up a lot of potential that wouldn't have existed even 20 years ago. "How do you bring people into that conversation? You do something bold, and I think these hazelnuts are part of that."

Restoration of vetch infestations to pollinator-friendly habitat

— Gino Graziano

Bird vetch is commonly seen climbing fences and trees along roadsides in Southcentral and Interior Alaska. Unfortunately, this isn’t good for the trees and other plants that vetch climbs and smothers along roadsides and where it begins to grow into forests which has led many of us to consider the plant invasive and in need of management. On the other hand, those pretty purple flowers are fairly attractive to some pollinators, and because pollinators are so important, we don’t want to remove pollinator habitat when we remove the bird vetch.

Here is where research at the Matanuska Experiment Farm is helping to find solutions. Others have been working to increase the availability of native plants that are attractive to pollinators for use in the revegetation of roadsides, gravel pits, and even for use in home flower gardens. We are comparing visitations of pollinators on these flowers with vetch. It is commonly thought that diverse plantings of native flowers will attract a greater diversity of pollinators, and we want to understand which plants do the best job of attracting those pollinators.

That’s not all. Before the restoration with the native plants, the vetch is removed. We have compared the removal of vetch with three herbicides that could be used to control vetch on roadsides or forested areas. We will next use soil from the treated areas to grow the desired pollinator species for restoration and evaluate the impact of the treatments used to remove the vetch on the potential success for restoring native pollinator plant species to roadsides and forest edges.

Swiss team visits AFES forest reference stands

On Sept. 2, Glenn Juday led a field trip to AFES’ long-term forest reference stands in Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest for Professor Markus Stoffel and staff of the Swiss Tree Ring Dendrolab. The lab is part of the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva. Stoffel was on a trip across Alaska with his local research colleague Benjamin Gaglioti, research assistant professor at the UAF Water and Environmental Research Center.
 
The Swiss lab specializes in the application of tree ring information to geomorphology, climatology, ecology, archaeology and natural hazard assessment — especially gathering evidence to predict snow avalanche hazards in the Swiss Alps. The visiting University of Geneva Dendrolab group included Ph.D. student Mattias Coullie, and scientific collaborator Sébastien Guillet.

Juday prepared a series of field trip guides to each of the six forest reference stands in the experimental forest, and has been handing them out to 2023 season visitors to get feedback and evaluate their effectiveness. The guides are highly visual and are made up of color illustrations of graphs, air photos, historical photos, times series photos and key data series.

 

The Sept. 2 Bonanza Creek field trip's first stop was at Parks Loop South (200+ year-old white spruce stand), where the visiting team was delighted to learn about the interaction of climate, tree growth, spruce seed crops, squirrel populations, canopy ecosystems, insect outbreaks, and tree death and recruitment. After the rain stopped, the group managed to drive on the muddy Bonanza Creek Road and visit two stands burned in the 1983 Rosie Creek Fire – Reserve West (white spruce) and Burned Birch Control.

 

The measurements and monitoring in the AFES reference stands at Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest have been used in some national international research collaborations and syntheses, and the Swiss visitors may become part of another one.

Busy summer for Forest Soils Lab

The Forest Soils Lab had a successful summer of fieldwork in the boreal forest.

The team installed three new sites to monitor the spruce bark beetle outbreak near Cantwell and Denali National Park. This project is in partnership with Ahtna, the Alaska Division of Forestry, and the Geophysical Institute. Helene Thomas and Leo Ahlers collected weekly plant physiological data to monitor tree decline after they were infested.

Matt Robertson developed, constructed, deployed, and monitored the field installation, in addition to conducting weekly unmanned aerial vehicle flights to observe the physiological changes from a remote sensing perspective.

Jessie Young-Robertson, Sam Dempster and newest employee Nathaniel Bolter conducted weekly measurements at Caribou-Poker Creeks Research Watershed to monitor forest physiology, stress responses and growth. There are 10 long-term monitoring sites at the research watershed, including areas where permafrost is degrading and deciduous woody plants are moving in.

A long-term monitoring site was installed at an aspen stand at Bonanza Creek LTER, where half the trees were sprayed with a pesticide to reduce the impact of the aspen leaf miner and the other half were left to experience the full impact. Researchers conducted weekly measurements to monitor the impacts of the aspen leaf miner on tree growth, water use, and physiology. This work is in partnership with Diane Wagner.

The lab also established a research site with Jan Dawe and OneTree Alaska in a birch stand off Farmers Loop Road to provide sap collectors with information about real-time sap flow in the spring.

The Soils Lab recently purchased a lidar to use with the UAV and multispectral camera to monitor forest growth, stand properties, and physiology from the air. This will help the team scale measurements to larger areas and better interpret remote sensing data with on-the-ground plant physiology measurements.

Bolter will be getting his master's degree in Natural Resource Management, in addition to being a research technician on the dendrochronology project (in partnership with Glenn Juday). Bolter attended the University of Arizona tree ring course in June to learn the basics of dendrochronology and visited Dr. Greg Goldsmith at Chapman University in August to learn how to measure wood anatomical features (to relate dendrochronology to other physiology measurements). We are excited to have Nathaniel join the lab!

The entire lab took the Alaska Soil Geography course this summer, with Jessie teaching the plant ecology portion. The team collected samples, brainstormed research ideas, and dug soil pits and learned about soils and permafrost.

Young-Robertson also presented a talk on her wood harvesting project at the Alaska-Canada Wood Energy Conference in early October.

Second year of garlic trials gets underway

A few days before snow started falling in Fairbanks, Glenna Gannon, Kristen Haney and graduate research assistant Soumitra Sakhalkar planted garlic in a trial plot at Georgeson Botanical Garden.

It’s the second official year of garlic trials, Gannon said, which are a collaboration between UAF and the Growing Ester’s Bioversity group.

"We grow out the garlic as part of the trials, and at the same time we're also acclimating it for our growing conditions here in Fairbanks," Gannon said. "A portion of the seed that's grown goes to their annal fundraiser garlic sale. At the same time, we're testing different varieties to see how well they perform.

This year, they planted 23 varieties of garlic, three more than in 2022. The trials are in the early stages. Gannon said they are just seeing which varieties do well and aren’t replicating trials at this time.

Hardneck varieties grow well in Alaska, although Gannon is also testing one softneck variety, Chilean red, which is highly valuable in the culinary scene.

"There's been been a few farmers who have dabbled with trying it on their farms," Gannon said. "We're including that in the formal trial here to see how it compares to these much hardier hardneck varieties that have historically done better here."

A porcelain variety called North was the big winner in 2023, she said. Typically, 2 pounds of seed are ordered for each variety of garlic tested. The North variety more than doubled that at harvest, with 4.3 pounds.

"That was highly competitive with varieties that have been evaluated here in the past," Gannon said, noting that Music and German extra hardy are among their best performers.

Among the varieties being trialed this year are varieties that tend to do well in the Pacific Northwest and the Upper Midwest.

For each 2 pounds of garlic Gannon orders as seed, she said she can expect from 40 to 70 cloves. To try to keep the plots even, she plants about 60 cloves of garlic in each plot. The larger the clove, the better it produces, she said.

The soil is tilled well and the cloves are planted 5 to 6 inches apart, about 4 inches deep. She uses a bulb planter to punch the initial hole and backfills with compost. Soft and fluffy soils are key, she said.

"You really don't want garlic to be planted into hard, compacted soil," Gannon said.

Rows are spaced 12 inches apart, bisected by drip irrigation. The garlic will be harvested late next summer.

Garlic overwinters well, and in fact need a cold winter period in which to form a bulb, Haney said. And while it could be planted in the early spring, in Fairbanks, cold soils turn quickly to wet and then to summer, so there's not a good period that allows for bulb formation.

"Really, from a producer standpoint, it's so much nicer to plant something now that you don't have to worry about in the spring when you're doing everything else," Gannon said.

ARS tour group visits UAF and Alaska farms

By Chelsea San Roman and Caley Gasch

On June 19-22 a group of scientists from Agricultural Research Service labs in Mandan and Fargo, North Dakota, and Pullman, Washington, visited Alaska.

First stop on the tour was the Matanuska Experiment Farm and Extension center. Here our staff and faculty showed off research plots made possible by their collaboration with the university, specifically in the areas of grain production, cover crops, and soil health.

Bob VanVeldhuizen speaks to group about grain research.

The next tour was at VanderWeele farm to see Alaska agriculture’s biggest food production farm. The group was able to see storage facilities, planting equipment, vegetable fields and the strawberry greenhouse.

Top, Ben VanderWeele talks about starts that will be planted soon. Jodie Anderson samples Seascape strawberries.

Later we visited The Musk Ox Farm to see agritourism in action. Here we learned what it takes to raise muskox and how to harvest their qiviut.

Dave Huggins from Pullman holds a muskox skull.

Last stop of the day was Sun Circle farm, Ann-Corrine Kell showed us that agriculture doesn’t need to be hundreds of acres to be successful. She grows organic veggies and flowers.

Milan Shipka, Sarah Beebout, and Jakir Hasan speak
to Ann-Corrine Kell about organic practices.

 

Wednesday morning we loaded up in our cars and headed to Fairbanks, we were able to tour the Arctic Health greenhouse on campus as well as the Fairbanks Experiment Farm where we could see the research plots and how they differed from their replicates in Palmer. We also toured the Georgeson Botanical Gardens with Katie DiCristina, where we learned about the peony industry in Alaska’s humble beginnings.

Tour group at the Georgeson Botanical Gardens.

Thursday morning the whole group of ARS tourers, plus staff and faculty from Palmer and Fairbanks loaded into a coach bus and headed to Delta Junction. Here we were joined by Phil Kaspari, Delta’s Extension agent and our most knowledgeable tour guide (plus yak farmer!). Phil gave us the whole story of the Delta Junction Barley Project, the challenges and successes, as well as the hopes for future growth. You can really tell that Phil loves Delta and is a pillar in the community.

Milan Shipka and Phil Kaspari give us the lay of the land.

Next we visited the Wrigley family’s farm and Alaska Flour Company. We were able to tour the facilities where Bryce Wrigley takes Sunshine barley and produces flour, couscous, cookie mix, and pancake mix. Bryce is working with the university to make agriculture sustainable and healthy for the soil and planet. He uses no till drills to plant, and cover crops to bring back nutrients to the soil. The Wrigley family kindly fed us all a lunch featuring some of their products.

Bryce Wrigley and Caley Gasch talk about their research collaboration.

After a filling lunch, we went to Shultz farm to see large-scale grass seed production in Alaska. They shared their story of coming to Alaska and starting from scratch in Delta Junction.

The Schultz brothers present the group with a problem.

Next we visited Alaska Range Dairy. Here we learned about the daily care and keeping of dairy cows. Scott Plagerman is interested in research into forage crops that provide nutritional balance for the cows and that can also grow well in Alaska. Scott uses technology to monitor his cows’ health and habits (Fitbit for cows). He also uses a different pasteurization process that makes drinking the milk a bit easier on everyone’s stomach (the chocolate milk is amazing) We were able to see the milking machines in action as well as spend a bit of time with the adorable calves.

Brent Hulke meets Ruthie the calf.

Last for the day and the trip was a visit to Mugrage Farm. They are the largest cattle farm in Alaska providing local beef to grocery stores and markets around the state. We were provided a meal of the biggest beef brisket in the state.

A meal at the Mugrages.

Jodie Anderson engaging in shenanigans.

A prickly little problem at GBG

Last winter, Lacey Higham, operations lead at Georgeson Botanical Garden, discovered that the garden on the west side of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus had a prickly little vandal living on the premises.

A porcupine had made its home in a culvert and spent weeks “living its best life” feasting on trees in the garden, according to Katie DiCristina, GBG manager.

Alaska porcupines usually spend their winters eating the inner bark and needles of white spruce trees. DiCristina said the animal had completely girdled some of the trees in the garden, which prevents the trees from moving nutrients from the roots to the area above where the bark was removed, effectively killing the trees.

This spring, four trees in the garden had to be cut down, two that were porcupine-damaged this year and two that were porcupine-damaged in the winter of 2021-22, she said.

A third, a Scotch pine at the entrance, lost almost all of its bark and is nearly dead.

Several other trees in the garden have gnaw marks on their trunks and branches where the porcupine sampled them and then moved on. Fortunately, the porcupine itself seems to have moved on.

DiCristina said the Scotch pine at the entrance doesn’t pose a hazard at this time, so she is leaving it as an educational tool.

"The garden is a stage where many ecological systems are at play," she said. "Although sometimes challenging, we strive to celebrate nature and use these events as learning opportunities for both us and our visitors."

Vegetable variety trials and Permafrost Grown projects in full swing

By Glenna Gannon

It has been an extremely busy and productive month for the Alaska Variety Trials and Permafrost Grown projects!

The Variety Trials have been planted in Fairbanks and Palmer.

This year we are evaluating over 130 cultivars of 17 different vegetable crops in Fairbanks and a subset of those in Palmer.

The trials in Fairbanks now include a high tunnel, and we will be comparing cultivar maturity rates and yield to field-grown plots. This month we also launched Arctic Berry Trials in Anaktuvuk Pass.

These trials are in collaboration with Gardens in the Arctic, where cultivars of haskaps (6), tart cherries (4) and currants (6) are being evaluated.

AFES research tech Amber Agnew (right) helps plant vegetables in new high tunnel beds in Anaktuvuk Pass with youth volunteers.

The Permafrost Grown team including myself, research tech Amber Agnew, INE faculty, Melissa Ward Jones and Ben Jones also were in Anaktuvuk Pass. The goal of the project is to evaluate the interactions between agricultural activities and permafrost and help inform best practices for high-latitude agriculture.

The team was able to help set up and instrument a high tunnel at the new home of Gardens in the Arctic, as well as, build and plant raised beds with local youth. As part of this project, four new weather stations have been installed around the state, including in Anaktuvuk Pass, the Fairbanks AFES farm and in Bethel.

Additionally, the Permafrost Grown project is also funding what we've dubbed "The Great Mulch Study" to evaluate the thermal impact of 11 kinds of plastic and organic mulches on soil at three depths (surface, 15 centimeters and 1 meter). This study will serve to both inform best cultural practices for farms and gardens with permafrost present, as well as fill in gaps on agricultural mulch research done by the AFES and Cooperative Extension in the past.

Research into rhodiola's potential as Alaska crop continues

It’s been more than a decade since the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service started researching a small plant that has the potential to be Alaska’s next value-added agricultural product.

Rhodiola rosea grows wild in northern Europe and Siberia and has been used as a folk remedy for thousands of years. Today, rhodiola, also called golden root and rose root, is used as an ingredient for herbal remedies and sports drinks as a substitute for caffeine. It is also used in skincare products.

“It’s really starting to take off,” said Stephen Brown, an agricultural agent with the UAF Cooperative Extension Service. Several businesses in Alaska are selling rhodiola products, but they’re in high demand and short supply.

Rhodiola is a bushy succulent that grows to about 18 inches tall. The plant is harvested for its root, which takes four to five years to mature when grown domestically. Where it grows in the wild, mostly in subarctic regions in China and Siberia, that timeline can be extended for years.

Given rhodiola’s popularity around the world as an herbal supplement and users’ reliance on wild stocks, the species has been depleted. It has been added or nominated for endangered species lists in several countries. However, parts of Alaska have an ideal climate for rhodiola to thrive as a domestic crop, says Petra Illig, an emergency medical physician in Anchorage who owns a business that sells rhodiola products, Alaska Rhodiola Enterprises.

It’s a huge opportunity for Alaska farmers, she said.

“My concern is that we are getting so busy with sales of rhodiola products and inquiries about raw materials — this isn’t going to work if we don’t have enough growers,” Illig said. “I truly believe Alaska could become the premier rhodiola supplier on the planet.”

Rhodiola, which likes cool, damp summers and cold winters is ideal for farmers in Southcentral Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. Besides a lack of general information about the plant and its potential uses, Illig said the long period between seeding and harvest – about five years — is a deterrent.

If Alaska farmers grew just a total of 100 acres of rhodiola, it would be enough to fuel another successful export, Illig said.

Similar to how Alaska’s peonies have found their summer niche in the flower market, rhodiola has its own following.

“Botanical companies, naturopaths and herbalists love this plant,” she said. “It’s a special plant, it’s such a rare commodity.”

— Julie Stricker

When is green-up? It's going to be late this year, and so is the birch sap run

Cold weather this April is delaying two cherished milestones in Interior Alaska: the start of the birch sap run and green-up.

Below-normal temperatures are likely to continue for a week or more, according to Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. “We’ve got green-up pushed back to quite late,” he said in mid-April. “We’re now looking at the 50% likelihood for green-up is now May 11-15, and the long-term average is May 8.”

That also means the birch sap isn’t likely to start running until late in April, Thoman said.

“The weather models continue pushing back any big warm-up, and it now looks nearly certain that we’re looking at very late sap flow/green-up,” he said, adding that April’s temperatures are “historic-level cold.”

Knowing when the sap is likely to start running is important for people who tap birch trees for the sweet liquid, which can be distilled into an even sweeter syrup, said Jan Dawe, who leads OneTree Alaska, part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Extension. Tapping too early results in the tree sealing over the tap hole, blocking sap flow, and tapping too late misses the first days of sweet, clear sap.

Thoman and Dawe have been working together to find a formula that will allow them to predict sap flow and green-up — which also heralds the start of the pollen season.

Starting March 1, Dawe starts to track the temperature. She adds up the number of degrees by which the maximum temperature exceeds 32 degrees Fahrenheit each day, called the Accumulated Heat Sum (AHS). Sap usually starts running by the time the tally reaches 225° AHS, depending on the location of the tree. OneTree Alaska issues a “sap watch” by 175 degrees AHS and recommends people on south-facing slopes tap up then. So far this season, the tally reached 70 degrees AHS on April 4 and stalled as cold weather moved in and refused to budge, Dawe said. On April 17, it had inched up to 85.

That cold weather is also delaying green-up. Since 1974, observers on the University of Alaska Fairbanks West Ridge have observed the trees on Chena Ridge to judge when green-up — defined by former UAF biosciences librarian Jim Anderson as the day birch and aspen leaves open just enough to produce “a faint but distinct green flush through the forest canopy,” occurs. Thoman notes that, as in forecasting weather, there’s a good deal of uncertainty weeks out and he’ll have a better idea in early May of when green-up is likely to happen.

“Of course, the other thing that is coming after green-up, within a day or two, is we have a pollen explosion,” Thoman said. “For people with sensitivities, that timing is certainly important to know.”