It has been awhile since a work update. But I have been keeping busy in the new year. I am told we are done processing peat cores (although they have told me that before and still found peat for me to process.)
I have now moved on to processing samples from an outside client- the National Forest Inventory or NFI. This week it involved the very important process of making mudpies. Seriously, I took stored soil samples out of the freezer, placed them in pie pans, and will soon be putting them in the oven. Who would have known that my childhood propensity to play in the dirt would actually be a transferable job skill?
Mud isn't the only thing we "bake" in our drying ovens. I also have been busy transferring numerous vegetation, woody debris, and moss samples into paper bags for drying. Fortunately we only deal with the Ontario samples in our lab, but there are sample sites from all over the country. The study provides researchers with a very detailed idea of the forest biomass across the country. Also once we have sent the required data to the NFI scientists and they are done with the samples, we take the samples and analyze them to get an understanding of the chemical composition of the samples as well.
The scope and breadth of the project is immense and I am lucky to be a part of it. (Or at least that is what I tell myself to get through the tedious sorting of samples and sample prep.)
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