Jarunetr (Nadia) Sae-Lim
Alaskan Arctic
In summer 2017, I joined a team of five scientists from Woods Hole Research Center, MA, and other eleven students across the US to conduct climate change research in the Yukon-Kuskokwim (YK) Delta. During my time there, I collected lake sediments using a piston-corer with great help from Dr. Paul J. Mann (now Northumbria University, UK). Later that year, I had been working closely with Dr. James M. Russell and Dr. Richard S. Vachula (now Auburn University) at Brown University on analyzing these lake sediment cores.
My research goal was to investigate how climate, ecosystem properties, and lake productivity have influenced and/or responded to Arctic wildfires over the last millennium. To do so, we utilized a lake sediment core from the YK Delta, Alaska to reconstruct the past fire, temperature, and environmental history of this area using charcoal analysis, GDGTs, and geochemical properties of the sediment core [read more].
We are interested in evaluating the performance of the charcoal-based fire proxy in Alaskan tundra setting. To do so, we compared charcoal-based fire reconstruction with known fires using ArcMap (GIS) [read more]. We looked into charcoal morphometry as a potential paleofire fuel type proxy [read more]. We are also interested in the applications of the charcoal-based fire proxy, especially the relationships between tundra wildfires and climate drivers over the Common Era [read more].