Wow, it feels like I did a ton in my first month and a half here, and at first not much of it happened in Valdivia. A day after I arrived, my mentor, Mauro González picked me up and we traveled together to partake in a week of fieldwork. This work is an ongoing collaboration between Chilean scientists and U.S. scientists, investigating the regrowth and recovery of ecosystems post-volcanic-eruption. It’s involved work at Volcán Cordón Caulle, Volcán Chaitén, and Volcán Calbuco.

The PI on the US side is Charlie Crisafulli with the USFS, who’s the head of the Forest Service’s activities at Mt. St. Helens and has been working there for 38 years, since just after the eruption. We stayed in a really cool eco-refugio just inside the bounds of Puyehue National Park, in a sort of A-frame cabin. This was my first time ever doing ecological fieldwork, or really anything related to biology, ecology, or environmental science, given that I have a straight geo background! I was worried I would just be taking up space, but everybody was very patient and generous in teaching me new skills. I learned how to take plant species cover, evaluate the health of tree canopies, identify some native Chilean herbs/shrubs/trees, do wood line intercepts, and learned a lot of the lingo associated with ecological fieldwork too.

I’m happy that I got to start out my ecological life on an international study! One of the notable aspects of the week was that the four study sites we worked on were in the “no-man’s-land” between Chilean customs (the Cardenal Samoré checkpoint) and the Argentine border, so even though we were technically still working in Chile, we had to pass through customs twice a day, coming and going. Twice a day I got a stern lecture from a PDI agent about how I needed to register my visa and apply for a Chilean ID card (which I already knew, but hadn’t done yet because we left for the field just after I arrived to Chile!). Also, each day upon reentry, we had to eat any remaining fruits and vegetables from our packed lunches as quickly as possible, which was always funny. We were mostly away from cell service and internet the whole time, so it was really fun getting to know the profs and the other field assistants (some of whom unfortunately live in the US, but some of whom are students at UACh and will be back here soon! My first three friends!) got to work directly with my mentor to do tree canopy cover, big satisfying red crayon, etc.

Another highlight of the week was hiking up Volcán Casablanca along with a friend of the owner of the refugio who works as a year-round mountain guide for elementary-aged children. The summit of Casablanca has the most spectacular 360-degree views of any hike I’ve ever been on. I made it (sunburned) back to Valdivia and to my temporary host family. They are really nice, but I didn’t see a lot of them during my first weeks here because I was off doing fieldwork. The team of scientists has been working on the Calbuco area since the first year post-eruption, summer of 2016. They’ve befriended two of the socios of Parque Valle los Ulmos, a piece of land that was originally bought to develop houses on, but new stakeholders turned the whole thing into a conservation park. Just a few years later, the volcano erupted, and suddenly the park was a hotbed (ha ha) of scientific intrigue.

The managers, Barbara and Pablo, are really cool and are open to bringing in scientists to study the area. While I was there, I helped out with Fred and Julia’s work in the Río Tepu, which is one of the most awe-inspiring geologic settings I have ever been in. It’s a river valley that got hit with pyroclastic density flows during the eruption. There are trees that were toppled, bent, and even turned to charcoal by the hot volcanic flows. The riverbed was inundated by tephra and volcanic bombs, and all this sediment has since been reworked by the river, exposing intermediate surfaces and also the original riverbed surface, with mats of roots of the now-dead Tepu trees. Fred and Julia are interested in mapping the different volcanic surfaces in this valley to understand how water, volcanic sediments, and nutrient inputs are interacting, so as to understand (and predict) which plants are regrowing and where and to what extent.

While I was there, I also turned 24! We had a really nice group dinner and a torta. The other best part of the week at Calbuco was that Barbara and Pablo had just gotten a 5-week-old Alaskan Malamute puppy named Thor, who is so cute that you almost can’t look straight at him. Oh It was really fun to feel like a nature detective. Doing things like excavating sediments around a standing dead tree and finding tiny leaves trapped in a volcanic layer, or putting together patterns of the river’s flow from the grain size of the different sediment terraces, all give a sense of being able to reconstruct what must have been happening over the past 3 years (which is SUPER short timescale in terms of the normal study of geologic processes, even erosional processes¡)

The day after I got back, I had a meeting with Mauro on campus to discuss project ideas, which are still nebulous. At the meeting, he introduced me to one of his doctoral students who’s investigating the rebound of insect communities in fire-affected Araucaria forests. Mauro suggested that maybe I could accompany Francisco on his fieldwork trip leaving the next morning to Tolhuaca National Park and Chinamuerta National Reserve. We had some snafus along the road, but as my first bona fide camping experience of my time here, it was absolutely gorgeous. The heat was considerable, and I learned how to install facing my fears for 2018.and monitor insect traps on Araucaria trees. (I’m not really an insect person, so this was very educational!) We also came across an araña pollito (which I know is not an insect) in the wild and all held it and played with it.

After I got back, my search for housing began in Valdivia… explored the city walking and running and biking, etc. Then I went back for another week of fieldwork at Volcán Calbuco with Pablo and Barbara, working on planning for drone flights whose images (hopefully, and with much guidance) I will use to create a Digital Surface Model (DSM) of the Río Tepu valley. We also did other work studying plots and transects in the river—I believe this will help to inform both Julia and Fred’s study as well as serving as baseline knowledge for the park’s own records and for eventual communication to the community/ to visitors of the park. I just got back last night and moved to my permanent (!) housing situation, which is actually with my temporary host father’s sister and her partner, also on Isla Teja (so, close to campus). I saw a variety of cabañas around the city that were all fine, but Xime and Frans and their bulldog Mariano are all very nice, and I’m excited to be here!