Hi my name is Courtney Collins. My name is Cassandra Elphinstone. I'm a project co-lead in the Garibaldi Alpine research team. I have been a project lead on this work in the Alpine in Garibaldi Park.

So the Nch'kay Garibaldi Alpine Research Project has been exploring the effects of recreation and climate change on alpine plant communities. The project is split into kind of two locations, on the closer, much more recreationally accessed side of the park people hike through and often trample alpine plant communities. And so this project has been exploring the impacts of people on plant community development.

So we're co-leading the trampling study this year, it's kind of a continuation of last year where we were looking at the effects of trampling on the plant communites up in the Garibaldi area typically like Taylor Meadows, Black Tusk, Panorama Ridge. These areas were picked by Natalie Chardon, who led the study initially. She was looking for the four species; so there's blueberry, there's pink heather, there's a white heather, and then there is like a sedge species in general because those are quite common in the park. And then also areas where there was clearly trampling happening that was not on the trail.

In each location we decided we would have one transect that was in a trampled area and then we'd have another transect that would be at least five metres away from the trail and supposedly untrampled and at each of those we set up a little white stake at the beginning of each of our 10-metre transects so that we could come back to it in the following years and survey it in the exact same spot.

We published a manuscript last summer on the effects of trampling on the alpine plant communities and we found that, not that surprisingly, graminoids, so grasses and sedges, are some of the most resilient communities to hikers and they come back very quickly. Whereas the more deciduous shrubs are actually quite sensitive and it takes much longer for them to recover.

On the far side of Garibaldi Lake there has been quite rapid glacial retreat. On this side of the park, we've been exploring how alpine plants are responding to climate change. So for our warming experiment we have plexiglass open-top hexagonal chambers that we place into the tundra to warm up tundra plants species about 1 to 2° Celsius to simulate climate warming. In each of these plots we're measuring a lot of different things. We have small climate stations that measure soil moisture and soil and air temperature. We also measure the plants using plant phenocameras which are mounted at the top of these meter-and-a-half tripods and those are taking time-lapse imagery of our plots. And we're looking at how this warming affects the tundra communities.

We're looking at changes in plant phenology, and we're also looking at soil microbial community responses to warming. Some exciting things that we're seeing is there finding that warming is affecting the timing of tundra plant root growth and increasing th synchrony between the timing of root growth and microbial biomass in the soil. So we think this is going to have a pretty strong implication for carbon cycling in this system.

One other experiment that I co-led this summer was a drone survey using a LiDAR-based drone across the entire Sentinel and Sphinx Bays of Garibaldi Lake. We are looking at different plant communities across these landscapes and trying to map them in a very high spatial resolution. We have been working with UBC Work Learn undergraduate students as well as students at the University of Victoria.

I'm Sebastian Yerex, the student lead on the Drone survey. I'm piloting the drone, planning the flight missions, and creating a DEM and and orthomosaic with drone data. The orthomosaic and the DEM that I'm creating are a good baseline for other research. They kind of provide context and help us understand the landscape that's up here on a very fine scale level.

I am the student lead for the GIS pixel classification. What we're trying to understand here is what the capabilities of GIS are for classifying different plant communities with satellite and drone imagery. So we've been been looking at how the different vegetation communities are spatially structured across Sphinx and Sentinel Bay and how different components of the glacial retreat area are actually contributing to different plant community types. And in particular we're finding that in areas of higher slopes we have lower woody plant encroachment cover, higher intact tundra community.

After the COVID-19 pandemic the numbers of people in BC Parks skyrocketed, so it's become of interest to the park to know where more infrastructure should be going in without doing a huge amount of harm to the the ecosystem. We've been kind of building this overall map of the whole park to see where the community, plant communities are to know where infrastructure and trails should go based on these findings.

We've been also working with the Squamish Nation to develop an overlay of both culturally important areas and plants and animal species overlaid with where park permits and other boundaries to access exist. The goal of this map is to be able to highlight, for governments, kind of clear communication about where access is limited and which of these areas are culturally important for the Squamish.

Alpine zones, in addition to Arctic tundra, are some of the most rapidly changing areas of the planet they're warming at a much faster rate than lower-elevation areas and we're finding that changes in these ecosystems are extremely dynamic and poorly understood. So we're really excited to be some of the first large-scale research happening in the coast mountains of BC hopefully if we receive funding from the NSERC Alliance we'll be able to continue really leading and carrying out this exciting research.