A trip to the mountains: Seminsky Pass and Forest Composition

At 8:15 on Saturday morning October 6th, we met at the front gate of Gorno-Altaisk State University to wait for the bus that would take us on an overnight trip to Seminsky Pass - (elevation close to 1894 m - about 300 meters higher than Mt. Marcy) . Seminsky is about 190 km from Gorno and is the  highest pass on the chuy highway as you drive south from Gorno into the golden mountains. Eight of my students, my two daughters, the driver and myself headed out of town with the goal of stopping 3 times on the way at different elevations.  I brought along some information to share from research I had done about some of the species we would see, the changes in abiotic conditions as you climb up in elevation, and the changes that climate change has already wrought in the siberian mountains with respect to forest composition and distribution.

Lida and Vicka keep us smiling!

Our first stop along the highway to talk about forest composition.

It won't come as any surprise to students of forestry or ecology that the lower elevations, like in our subboreal areas, are inhabited by birches and poplar, willows in the lowlands and some spruce and fir. 

Interestingly, like in the Adirondacks (my back yard for instance) there is an abundance of scots pine, but here they grow straight, unlike many of the planted stands we see that have double leaders and crooked stems.  Around the city in the low hills there are forests dominated by these that look like the plantations but this is within the broad range of their natural habitat and so they are likely natural forests (common in the zone called 'light needled mountain tiaga' - see below).
The birch that you can see in the background of the picture of us above is Betula pendula.  At this time of year with branches pedulous, the leaves yellow-gold and thinning, they look to me like the left over sparkles of those big gold-edged fireworks that disperse and then the edges hang in the sky for a while.

The vegetation structure as you travel up the mountains is really much more complicated than I shared with my students, as you can see just looking out at the landscape in the image below.
These are determined by the combination of temperature and precipitation which in-turn are influenced by aspect and elevation. The picture that I took below gives a pretty good visual of these zones if you use your imagination:-)

Eight primary vegetation belts are described by researchers for the mountains of southern Siberia,

Beginning at the highest elevation belt :

(from N. M. Tchebakova, R. A. Monserud, E. I. Parfenova. 2001.  Phytomass change in the mountain forests of southern Siberia under climate warming  - on-line paper, a collaboration of researchers from Krasnayarsk and Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado)

 

Mountain tundra (lichens, mosses,

Rhododendron, Betula rotundifolia) with temperature sums (growing degree days ) <700C and no value in the dryness index.

Subalpine mountain taiga (cold and wet)

Pinus sibirica and Abies sibirica, including wet subalpine meadows)

Subgolets sparse mountain taiga (cold and dry; both dark- and light-needled open taiga)

Dark-needled mountain taiga (dominated by
Pinus sibirica and Abies sibirica)

 

Light-needled mountain taiga (dominated by

Larix sibirica and Pinus sylvestris)

Dark-needled chern taiga (floristically rich and productive warm taiga mixed with

Populus tremula),

Subtaiga/forest-steppe

(Pinus sylvestris, Larix sibirica and Betula pendula)

Steppe and dry steppe

(Caragana, Spirea, Cotoneaster, Stipa, Fescuta, Koellria)

 

The place we stayed was right on the pass is an old olympic training center for nordic skiing with a complex of dorm type buildings and different size cottages for people to stay. Our first stop, and where we spent the night was at Seminsky Pass which is clearly in the zone of Dark needled mountain tiaga. The area was Dominated by Pinus sibiricus heavily draped in 'old mans beard' lichen (Usnea).  The air was incredible and it was our first snow experience in our trip.  The only place the snow fell that day and night was on the pass.

The coolest thing about Pinus sibirica (which the locals call siberian cedar - underscoring the value of the latin names!!!) is that while it is a 5 needled pine like our own in the Adirondacks, it has large seeds (pine nuts just like the ones we buy from Pinyon pine at home) that are collected and snacked on right out of the cone.  In the Altai they are sold all over the place and are prized as snacks. We picked our own out from under the layer of fresh falling snow...



There is a Stolovaya where you eat excellent Russian food in a nice warm feeling, carved wood panel sided cafeteria. Several families with young nordic skiers were there for early season training. You cant just rollerski on the streets of Gorno, like you can outside of Lake Placid... No sir! I dont imagine you can do that anywhere on normal Russian roads, it is such a big place to take care of!! And so this facility had specially paved paths that were for the purpose.

 

 

 There was a biathalon shooting range where we picked up a few spend shells for our young nordic skier friends:-) 


After a lot of walking, talking and great eating and a gathering in the Devchata's (Girls - young women) room we got some sleep and the next morning headed a bit further into the mountains to one of the most beautiful passes (though not as high) in the northern Altai mountains: Cheke-toman pass

The view from the pass is really stunning.  My favorite part was/is  the larches (Larix sibirica, 'leestveneetsa' is the Russian transliteration) burning on the hills.  In the Adirondacks larches are associated with wetlands and low areas, going gold with a backdrop of Abies balsamea.  Here they are an incedibly cold and wind tolerant species that are distributed in several of the forest communities, but are the last remaining tree in the higher elevations.  At the tops of some of the lower peaks they are all that remain on the ridgeline where the rocky steeps slope drop away and leave no soil for tree establishment.  I'm adding a few pictures so you can see some of the beauty of Altai in the fall (no reds, we miss those, but a golden beauty that glows)

On the way to the pass - out of the snow

Larches on fire on the hills

Cheke-tomon pass is 1460 meters and has one of the most beautiful views in these mountains

 

This is the valley you look into from the Cheke-tomon pass.

 Tolono takes Willa and Elsa up to the sacred place on the pass (all passes have sacred places where you pay tribute to the spirits in the native Altai culture) and explains the proper way and the significance. The prayer flags on the hill on the up-side of the pass are plentiful.

Devchata! (young women - girls)

Finally, some of the materials that I used to share with my students are summarized below for the interest of any ecologists.  I find it so fascinating to study this ecosystem and see the similarities to our own in terms of composition, and effects of climate change.

A bullet summary of the paper:

Spatial distribution and temporal
dynamics of high-elevation forest stands
in southern Siberia
Global Ecology and Biogeography,  (2010) 19, 822–830
Vyacheslav I. Kharuk*, Kenneth J. Ranson, Sergey T. Im and
Alexander S. Vdovin

•With elevation increase (and thus a harsher environment) forests shifted to steep wind-protected slopes.
•A considerable increase in the stand area and increased elevation of the upper forest line was observed (global warming)•Warming promotes migration of trees to areas that are less protected from winter desiccation and snow abrasion (i.e. areas with lower values of slope steepness). Climate-induced
•forest response has significantly modified the spatial patterns of high-elevation
•forests in southern Siberia during the last four decades, as well as tree morphology has shifted as a result of climate change.


The figure below shows that changes in precipitation and temperature in summer and winter in Siberia have been similar to those in the Adirondacks. Significant increases in winter temperatures in the last 100 years.

 

Both the Adirondack and the Altai are on the edges of biomes and thus are more prone to fast ecological changes due to climate change. (I try to show with below)

The more things change the more they stay the same!!  stay tuned
Celia

Dima and Tatiana build their new home

Just about two blocks off of the two main streets in Gorno-Altaisk, busy with traffic and lined by shops (Magazines) and apartment buildings where people own 1 to 4 room flats (like the one we are living in), you find you are in the small hills that line this valley town and you are also into homes (Doma's).  All are complete with a kitchen garden, often with a hoop house or greenhouse to extend the growing season, and often with a Banya (traditional Russian bathing house - not to be missed whenever there is an opportunity!!!).  It feels like a different world to me out here. 
The houses range from the traditional small, square wooden log house with rough but ornately carved wood trim and colorful paint around the windows, to larger, sometimes brick, sometimes cinder block, and sometimes vinyl sided.. sometimes interesting combinations of these materials. Almost inevitably, the garden  this time of year has the last of the capusta (cabbage) and maybe some squash, and certainly beautiful flowers around the edge or all over mixed in.  We haven't had frost yet in the City and the flowers are still in bloom.  Many are familiar: cosmos, asters, snap dragons, big dalias.  I love walking here in the morning and peering over the makeshift fences that seperate these goreous little pieces of someones carefully cared for paradise.



I followed Tatiana (Tanya) into the house throught the door in
the basement

The roads are mostly unpaved once you get off the main drag and no one plows them in the winter. Well, at least it is no ones specific job!! Tatiana told me this when I asked as we wound our way up the narrow and bumpy dirt road to the building site of their new home, not far from the apartment which has grown too small for them and their 3 growing children. Tatiana is a colleague at the University and a new friend. Her husband Dima (short for Dimetrie) is a technical wizz and a bit old fashioned in the choices he has made for building their home. We were on our way to run other errands and I noticed the back seat was full of bags of dried leaves. I asked about their use and Tatiana said that Dima was using them for insulation in the new house... I had to see at that point! They did me the honor of taking me there so I could see.

On the bottom floor is the stove that burns both wood and coal and it will be the back up heat when its needed in the winter. I was reminded of so many Adirondack basements, where, while we use mostly propane and oil or kerosene, the auxillary heating units live to keep pipes from freezing or maintain a minimum temperature while the owners are away for a while. It looks durable and functional!

I follow Tatiana up the winding staircase to the main floor of the house which has most of the drywall in place. I want to say a word about the drywall.  Remember I mentioned that Dima is a bit old fashioned?  He has chosen to include in the insulation of the house a layer of traditional sand and clay.  Under all the drywall is a lattice like this one below. 

 

Packed into the diamond shapes on top of the log exterior is the old style sand and clay mixture you can see on the right hand side.  

 

The first thing you see as you come to the top of the stairs is a gorgeous wood stove - designed after a Russian Peech (sp?) but is not, because they have two floors and the peech is designed for one story structures. This stove/fireplace will heat a good bit of this floor,because Dima built it so the bricks would hold and re-radiate heat.

 

 

 

The traditional Russian stove sits in the middle of a one story structure and is built of some sort of heat holding cement material. In the kitchen it serves as the stove but the other 3 walls are part of the adjacent rooms and they radiate incredibly and warm the whole house. I will never forget my fascination when I stayed in my first house with a peech in a village somewhere north of Ulan Ude near Lake Baikal in the early 2000's when I was lucky enough to be included in my first trip to Siberia lead by Dan Plumley (thanks again and again Dan!). Later in the season this fall we will be staying in a village in a house with a peech, so I can show the girls and load some photos.  It seems just so perfect and efficient to me to have this central structure for heat on a cold night. Im sure at this point in my life I will never build a home (or be part of building one) but if I were, I would fight to have a peech for the practical romance of it..
 

 

These are the leaves that were in the back of the car; well some of them.  Each time Dima comes to work on the house (he builds it himself with the help of one other man and so it takes time), he brings more leaves and is using them for insulation on the layer of house between the basement and first floor.  He will use other insulation as well, but this is the touch of the practical old fashioned.  Why not use the old ways if they are good!!??

 

 

Dima has purchased a new tool that will make it much easier for him to put the aluminum framing for the walls together.  He demonstates its use to us and smiles at the way it will make the job so much faster.

This arched doorway is also typically Russian and they have only one in the house.  You can see how thick the structural walls of the house are.

 

Tatiana told me that Dima thought it so necessary to have a abnya at their new home, he began building that first.  Ya caglassna (I agree!).  Below are three pictures of the banya.  The first is the outside, the second is the first inside room (a wall is still to be built to seperate) and the third is the actual hot room. Banya was, and still is in many villages without running water, the way families bathed.  I understand that the order was generational, often ending with the children when there was less heat than at the beginning of banya after the fire was built..  Even laundry was/is done with the warm water left over from the baths.

 

  The way banya differs from sauna, is that its wet! Not only in the hot room, where stoves are designed with rocks around them for pouring water on to make steam (as in some saunas) but there is an extra room just outside the hot room that often has water piped in and even in many cases a pipe that runs through the stove to provide a hot water tap. Buckets and dippers line the wooden plank seats and when you have had plenty of heat, you come out into the room next door and choose a bucket, mix your water from the hot and cold sources and bathe. Lots of sloshing and washing.. then back into the warmth if you like and rinse off at the end. Nothing allows one to sleep better, as far as I am concerned. Another great feature of banya is 'venicky'. These are bundles of dried young birch (Betula pendula, I think) twigs with leaves on them that are used to swack each other with as you recline on the benches in the hot room. The idea is to bring circulation to the skin, not to hurt each other:-). Its a pretty remarkable combination.

 

The view also differs from an apartment view.  the fall here is full of yellows, with reds only in some understory bushes like sumac and red osier dogwood (or close relative) along the river.  But it is beautiful none-the-less.  this is the view from the top story window of the house.  I must say I prefer it over the views just a few blocks away in the city center.

..... but if they every miss the old view, they can look out at another angle and see the city in all its busy glory right down the valley..

 I think they have the best of both worlds! Good luck Tatiana and Dima, it's a beautiful house. Thank you for sharing it with me and letting me share it with my like minded American friends!

 

Teaching Ecology as an English Language Course: Project Snow Leopard brochure

Final products of 'Project Snow Leopard' Brochure

As I have said, my students are mostly non-science students, thought some clearly have more background than others.  It turns out that the Biology students have a schedule that is different than the students who are taking a language curriculum  and their schedules conflict with the time of my classes and so I don't really see them.

The other challenge is that even if they could attend my class, they are not good English speakers and apparently are intimidated by the prospect of trying to understand in English so they do not tend to participate in courses offered in English..  I know it is a challenge for the University to try and incorportate English into the other curriculua since the default language for international publication and communication is English.  Its a big discussion here at Gorno-altaisk State and also, I think I understand correctly, a directive from the Federal Government to Universities to step up the learning and incorporation of English into programs.



This is Vasil. He reminds me of some of my PSC

students. He seems to know quite a lot of the ecology and cultural ecology of the Altai, he is currently not attending classes because he has a job taking a group of German and British Hunters out in the Moutains on an expedition. He has a family to support and has to take such opportunities. His English is very good and he really participates in class

 

 

We have it so easy in the English speaking countries!! I often feel embarassed that other cultures work so hard to learn English to be successful globally and we hardly incorporate other languages into our educational systems, because we dont HAVE to.  Case in point; I , who speaks no Russian (well I am trying hard... more on that in another blog) and only a smidgeon of French and even smaller smidgeon of Spanish (4 years of Latin is the best I did), have the great opportunity to come to Russia, work with students and have colleagues for 3 months.  If I were a native Russian speaker with no English.. I would not be able to come to the United States in the same capacity because no one speaks Russian (or most other languages for that matter).  Hmmm , I feel really lucky, but seems like there is some great inequality there....

Tak (so), back to my class and the challenge to improve English skills while engaging students in my passion and mission here - Ecology...

Here are the objectives I gave my student on the first day of the course:

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to / по окончании данного курса слушатели смогут:

·       In English, describe the variables that influence the distribution and abundance of organisms / описывать факторы, влияющие  на распределение и численность организмов, на английском языке;

·       In English, define some concepts that are central to the understanding the study of ecology / давать определения ключевым экологическим понятиям на английском языке;

·       Practice reading, discussing and analyzing published papers, in English, from ecological studies / читать, обсуждать и анализировать научные статьи из англоязычных изданий экологической направленности;

·       Link ecological concepts and knowledge to the process of developing simple hypotheses that can be tested with empirical data collection / устанавливать связи между экологическими концептами и теоретическими знаниями и процессом разработки простых гипотез, которые могут быть проверены при помощи эмпирических данных;

·       Conduct a simple ecological inquiry (study) and draw conclusions from the data they collect including simple correlations and relationships among ecological variables using a statistical program/ проводить простые экологические изыскания (исследования) и делать выводы, основываясь на полученных данных, включая корреляции и взаимосвязи между экологическими переменными факторами, используя статистическую программу

 Lucy and Alice (from  The Snow Leaopard Conservancy in California) had just been visiting the University and met with some students at the time of the Snow Leopard Festival that I took part in and wrote about earlier.  A Snow Leopard population exists in these Altai mountains, and so I was keeping with my desire to teach ecology 'in place' and address my third teaching objective - "Practice reading, discussing and analyzing published papers, in English" (which I think also allows for the learning of concepts and definitions fundamental to Ecology) by choosing a conservation biology paper describing and reporting on  a program to help protect farmers livestock and the tiny remaining Snow Leopard population in part of the mountains in Pakistan.

In the interest of full disclosure and in case you are interested, Ive included the link below.  It is an interesting paper and not hard to read.

Protecting the Snow Leopard and Enhancing Farmers' Livelihoods

Author(s): Shafqat Hussain
Source: Mountain Research and Development, 20(3):226-231. 2000.
Published By: International Mountain Society
DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1659/0276-4741(2000)020[0226:PTSLAE]2.0.CO;2
 URL:
http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1659/0276-4741%282000%29020%5B0226%3APTSLAE
%5D2.0.CO%3B2

 

 I explained to the students, that while this was not a science paper per se, it would be easier to read.  I also explained that having science knowledge doesnt make change, it only informs change.. Change only comes when we use our knowledge of ecological problems and link it with human psychology and reach people where they are.  You have to address peoples problems if you want to make progress on environmental problems.

Erlan and Vasil develop their brochure

 

My goals were to have students read, and understand the article, choose important informational points that justified the study and then have them develop ( in groups) a hand written three fold brochure that could be delivered to another village (with the cooperation of the village government) to convince those villagers to be involved in the insurance program that would pay them back or their predated goats, and reduce retaliatory killings of Snow Leopards by the farmers

DAY 1 - Reading the Abstract. and locating important points in the article
All the students had been sent a copy of the paper, but, like many of my PSC students, neglected to bring it to class, though they were asked to:-).. so we made a couple copies and I put up the abstract on the smart board at the front of the class... I asked students to work in pairs or groups of three to read the abstract together in English and find all the words they didnt know and come up and write them on the board.. some of the words were:
two-fold
Livestock
precarious
joint
retaliatory

There were maybe 10 words that we needed to define and I needed to explain - which was fun - and then we read together, me at the front of the class pointing at the words and explaining...

After we had the general idea of the article and what it was about, students worked together for the rest of the class to cruise the paper and look for important justification sentences in the introduction to use in the developent of the brochure next class.

DAY 2 - Making the brochures - good old fashioned paper, scissors, glue, regular and colored pencils, and figures and pictures cut from photocopies.....were the materials I brought and what we used for class. Once the students got going and gained confidence, it was really fun.

Elsa (my daughter) and Vika and Masha (Masha is 15 and comes from the secondary school) discussing their brochure

The final brochure of Beckjon and Mirlan (not pictured here)

 

 I still have to give feedback on photocopies of the brochures, correcting sentence structure, adding articles (since Russian has no articles (the , a ) they are often left out...
I think this would be a good activity for entry level science students as well.  Shouldnt we be improving our English, writing and organizational skills in all our disciplines.. I will use this type of exercise again in my own classes someday:-)