Vanessa Stretch is a PhD student at the University of Guelph. Her research is combining paleolimnolgy (lake sediment cores) and tree rings to investigate fires regimes in the forests in the Hinton foothills. On a field tour for the Foothills Research Institute’s Healthy Landscapes program, the University of Guelph demonstrated how lake sediment cores are collected and sampled. Vanessa Stretch’s research is looking at spatial and temporal variability of fires in the Hinton region. With lake sediment analysis, she should be able to go back 1000 years. She explains the details of her tree sampling regime in relation to her two small lakes. And then they demonstrate the gravity core sampler at the edge of this small peat bog surrounded lake.
Her talk was part of the “Burning Issues in Alberta’s Forests” workshop and tour by the fire history research team of Foothills Research Institute’s Healthy Landscapes program at Hinton and Jasper National Park on July 10, 11, 2013.
