Everyone outside the TWA offices before fieldwork, clockwise from top left: me, Fanny, Pomme, Sam, Billie Joe, Anna and Oursane.
Me in chest waders, a first.
I just got back from a research trip to the Acadian Peninsula. The first few days we did fieldwork with a research partner on the new Peatland to Eelgrass (PLATE) study funded under Transforming Climate Action’s Community Climate Action Fund. Fanny Noisette’s team from ISMER at UQAR, and Billie Joe and Sam from the Tabusintac Watershed Association, showed MES Anna Macdonald and I what it looks like to do sampling and coring in eelgrass beds across the coast. This was my first time in chest waders. The first site was so muddy I was sure I was going down, but I got coached along and stayed dry. Three very different sites and substrates, and three very different size of eelgrass and cores. The need to hold underwater the people doing the coring, who were otherwise too buoyant to sink the core, was a surprise but good fun (except when the snorkel got cleared in your face afterward). The weather could not have been better, but the mosquitoes were fierce. Anna was smart and brought her face net, which came out later. This time with our partners was great, to understand better their landscape and needs, but the interdisciplinary experiences were also thrilling. Fanny’s team works incredibly hard not only in the field, but afterwards with carefully making core ‘cookies’, measuring, indexing, labelling, etc. I won’t even see the hard work that will happen in the lab. Thanks to Fanny, Pomme and Oursane for the education!
Learning about eelgrass
Cute
From that work we transitioned to a retreat for the TCA TranSECT project, Transformative adaptations for social-ecological climate change trajectories. For this, folks from Dalhousie, UQAR and Laval converged on the Deux Rivieres Resort in Tracadie-Sheila for a few days of updates, networking and collective writing for the phase 2 grant due next week. Students came along, too, to help envision the HQP Village, facilitated by Village Coordinator Elson Galang. More great weather (and mosquitoes) continued through the weekend. The writing tasks were surprisingly fruitful. I think we all learned a lot about what the 14 work packages in this large research project were doing. This was a big win for process as well as product. Thanks to Line Bourdages for the hard work organizing and keeping us fed, including when local caterers simply decided not to appear!
Collective writing in action
Killer sunset on the last night, #nofilter
