Where is Schefferville, anyway?

Yes, I'm spending the next 2 full weeks at the McGill Subarctic Research Station in Schefferville, Québec, sampling my field experiment with moss & their associated micro-ecosystem. And the most common question I get is: “Where is that?” *sigh* If only I'd found a reason to do research at the Bellairs research institute in the Barbados, I might have avoided this question :P

Schefferville is in northern Québec, near the border between Québec and Labrador. So close, I could easily walk to Labrador in a few hours from town. Getting to Labrador City would take a little longer ;-)

Vital statistics:

• 54º48'00” N, 66º50'00” W
  
• Government of Canada Topographic Map reference: 023J15
  
• Declination as of 2009: 23° 9' West
  
• Population as of 2006: 202 (actually closer to 800-1000 people in town)
  

Formerly known as the town of Knob Lake, Schefferville was home to a mining community until the iron mine closed in the 1980's and most people left. It has since been a destination for hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities, facilitated by the outfitters based in town. There is, however renewed interest in iron ore mining in the area, though not by the same company that built the railway. As far as I know, Schefferville has one school, an arena, sports field, one general store, a hardware store / snowmobile repair shop, a combination Dépanneur & SAQ Express (alcohol counter), much of it owned by the same man. There are also at least 2 bars in the area, although I was told not to go to a certain one unless I wanted to get into a bar fight. The airport is actually much closer to town than the train station, although there is a taxi from the train. It doesn't look like one, and is in fact an old ambulance past it’s prime, but you can ask around and someone will point it out when it comes.

I've been impressed with the depth of the scenery here: the land and the sky have a distinctly more three-dimensional appearance and feeling than in an urban environment. Even the sky has more depth than I remember in Vancouver, with usually at least 3 layers, making for some striking and beautiful sunsets.

I made a little flyby tour of the area in Google Earth, including my study site. I am such a nerd.

En Route à Schefferville

It is taking me 2 days to get to Schefferville from Montreal. The first day was spent flying. Actually, most of it was spent waiting to fly. The AeroBus service from the main bus station in Montreal takes people directly to the airport for $14 in 45-50 minutes, at specified 25 minute intervals. There are a number of regional airlines that fly to Sept-Iles, many stopping in Québec city. So, a brief 45 minute flight took me from Montreal to Quebec City, in the smallest plane I've flown in (which is still pretty big). Rationally, I think smaller planes make more sense and I expect them to be easier to actually get in the air: it amazes frankly, how the bigger super-jets are even able to get airborne in the first place. Yet, psychologically, the smaller planes move a lot more, and bounce around more in the turbulence, making it worse if you're a bad flyer or have motion sickness. I did have bouts of motion sickness, mostly as a result of gas bloating I've been experiencing. A phazyme gel cap (simethicone) gets rid of the bloating, and by extension, my motion sickness.
The Quebec Airport is possibly the smallest airport I've been to (even smaller than the one in the Galapagos!). I had to wait 3.5 hours for my connecting flight to Sept-Iles, which was a lot easier to endure thanks to free wireless internet access :D The Airport in Sept-Iles was about the same size, though actually felt nicer. I haven't seen the airport in Schefferville yet, but I expect it to be even smaller. I think the Quebec airport was in the middle of development / expansion, so we'll see how it changes in the next year or 2. I'll be back...
From Sept-Iles, there are 2 ways to get to Schefferville. The fastest is by local airline (Inuit Air, for example, which might even fly to Schefferville from other locations), and the cheapest, by a factor of 6, is by train. Getting a train ticket took a bit of hunting down, but I finally figured it out. Other internet posts that turn up in a Google search mention the fact that you can't actually get a ticket from the train line itself (Quebec North Shore & Labrador), but you have to go through a local travel agent. That is now Tshiuetin Rail transportation, in Sept-Iles. The train leaves Sept-Iles for Schefferville on mondays and Thursdays, and returns the following day on Tuesdays and Fridays. The train costs 1/6 the price of a flight, but takes 10 hours, through some slowly changing boreal terrain, which is like many areas of northern central Canada: moderately repetitive. But still pretty neat, and you get to watch the vegetation change slowly, with the trees getting smaller, more black spruce & tamarack replacing aspen and conifers, more lichen and less moss (boo for me :P). The occasional burn or clear cut along the way is also impressive, and breaks the monotony, as well as at least one tunnel.
Unlike the previous descriptions I found, there was no dome observation car, but instead, there was a dining car with some processed food. I brought my own foodstuffs, but did take advantage of the ice cream bars from the freezer. The best place to hang out is probably on the deck between the 2 cars, where the windows are cleaner and often open, so you can look out and appreciate the scenery and even poke your head out tentatively (while watching for upcoming signs!).

I admit, I was tired this morning getting on to the train, after a hectic week of coordinating materials and delivery (some of which didn't quite work out). I managed to have 2 boxes delivered via Greyhound to the bus station in Sept-Iles to pick up on my way to the train station. But, it took 1 day longer than they told me it would. Thankfully, I allotted extra time for just such a possibility. The thing I have learned most this week is that you get much better service and are more likely to get results in this province if you speak french instead of english. Why people do their jobs better depending on what language I speak is a bit perplexing, but there it is. Welcome to Quebec.
Anyway, I was tired. And it's a small, regional railway, so it's not like Via where there are signs directing you and people checking your ticket. I was a little surprised when I checked my luggage on the train that the handler asked me my destination: I figured the train must stop along the way. And it does, including Labrador City. When I went to board, I was given a vague direction, and I went out the door of the tation, left, and got onto a car, without a single staff person directing me outside. The train pulled out of the station 10 minutes before the scheduled departure time (9 AM), and I began to look around for the observation car. There was none. I began to become concerned that I boarded the wrong train. About 2 hours into the trip, during one of the drop-off stops, an employee of the railway asked me what my desination was. I said “Schefferville”, hopefully, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when he didn't react as if anything was out of the ordinary. The first sign I was, indeed, in the right place. Then I slept. For most of the trip, with breaks to eat, walk around, and wrestle for my water bottle with one of the screaming kids on the train. The screaming was annoying, but I think he was teething. Quite cute & cherubic otherwise.

The train arrived roughly on schedule, about 11 hours after leaving Sept-Îles. Unfortunately, this is earlier than usual, so my ride was not there to pick me up at the station. After waiting almost an hour, and watching everyone leave (including the taxi), I dug out my bug spray to ward off the growing number of mosquitoes swarming my tender flesh. Luckily, The superintendent of the train took pity on me and offered me a ride into town. No one seemed to know where the McGill research station was, or even that there was one in town. Honestly, the town's not that big. The station is on the north-eastern edge, next to the airport, so I can understand that most people don't see it. The sign is also incredibly faded and only legible if you already know what it says. So, I made it. Now, to work on designing a field experiment, despite not having all the materials yet. *sigh*

Research Interests

After 2 semesters of studying and reading at the start of my PhD, my research interests are largely unchanged, though perhaps more focused, rephrased, or put into context. I am broadly interested in Biodiversity research: patterns of diversity, mechanisms that maintain diversity, and most especially the consequences of biodiversity or loss thereof. What is biodiversity good for? What are the links between ecosystem structure and function.
Ecological literature has had heated debate over two phenomena that are essentially patterns, with causal connections difficult to test empirically. The first is productivity - biodiversity relationships, with productivity on the X-axis, and species richness on the Y-axis, which seems to seek an environmental determinant of the number of species a particular habitat can support. The second, which continues to be relevant in the context of rapid biodiversity loss in many ecosystems, is the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function, which is often measured as species richness vs. productivity. A kind of bidirectional causality is certainly possible, especially given the number of species that modify their environments. A theoretical bridge was built between commonly observed patterns in both directions, in a recent multi-authored Science paper.
My interest lies primarily in the latter of the two relationships. The lazy part of me if optimistic about the many, generally positive relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem function. The cynic in me repeats the universal science caveat “it's more complex than that in reality”. Ecological systems are complex, and each species, even individual, does not simply act like a passive cog in a machine, contributing additively to the greater whole. Each component interacts, often multiplicitavely, with other components, leading to complex temporal dynamics, and adds noise to simple relationships between the number of species in an area, and measures of ecosystem function.
Not all species contribute equally to a particular function, and each species contributes differently to each measure of ecosystem function. However, interactions between species can lead to indirect links between a species and function, which can also be conditional on the composition of the interaction network. Welcome to complex systems.
There are ways to simplify the question for research purposes. Measures of ecosystem function that are largely independent of species composition, or are universal to all species, helps to minimize the effects of composition. Popular measures along this line include community biomass, ecosystem respiration, and perhaps fluxes of common nutrients such as Carbon, or even nitrogen, though the latter might be dependent on a small portion of the community, despite being necessary for all life.
The complexity doesn't end there, however. Communities of species do not exist in a neutral medium: ultimately, all life must cope with the environment external to the individual (cells, bodies, colonies, etc.). And we all know the environment on Earth is not constant. Not only do interactions between species affect the rates of biological processes, but so do changes in the environment. This is more than just climate change or global warming, but includes roughly cyclical patterns, such as diurnal or seasonal cycles, in addition to large-scale climatic events such as El nino. Climate change actually implies a change in some of these patterns. All these complex relationships means that climate change can have a huge impact on ecosystems at continental scales, as seen in evidence from the last ice-age. It also makes it very difficult to predict what those effects will be. Assuming we can accurately predict the effects of increasing greenhouse gases and increasing mean global temperature, many species seem to respond to changing climates ideosyncratically. Yet again, species interact and those interactions can affect how species will respond to changing environments: avoid stronger competitors despite missing otherwise favourable environments, or following prey species in harsher environments, switching to new resources that arrive in an existing habitat or that are found in new ones. Much of the results could be chaotic and unpredictable.
So I have to ask if it's even worth the effort of trying. I seems daunting at times, but I'm honestly interested in the larger issues of understanding the role of unstable environmental change in ecosystems in general. The impending Climate Change issue is a convenient way of focusing on one kind of environmental change, and a way to convince society to pay me for research I'm interested in doing anyway. The precautionary approach also suggests that we won't know if we can make accurate predictions unless we try, and monitor effectively, so we can hopefully learn from the experience. The pessimistic perspective says that this will ultimately result in only the documentation of intense biodiversity loss. And what's the point of understanding the role of biodiversity after most of it is gone forever? Well, evolution doesn't stop. And diversity tends to beget diversity. Even if we are at the brink of a mass extinction event, I am confident that Life will continue and species diversity will continue to grow (whether or not humans are included as survivors). I prefer to remain cautiously hopeful than surrender to helplessness.
Ultimately, ecology can teach us that we humans cannot survive without other forms of life: we need them to eat, help us digest food, produce oxygen to breath, etc. All life consumes energy and excretes high-entropy waste, in order to maintain a state of low internal entropy. Energy must come from somewhere (it can't be created or destroyed), and large amounts of waste are really an ecological opportunity waiting to be exploited. Give evolution enough diversity to work with, and it's only a matter of time. And time is a resource that appears never to be in short supply.

About this Blog

As of this entry, I am starting my PhD at McGill University in the Department of Biology.

My intention for this blog is to chronicle my research, which is broadly related to biodiversity: factors that structure and maintain biological diversity on ecological time scales, and implications of changes in biodiversity, such as ecosystem structure and function.

I hope to post comments on interesting articles, topics of discussion, research ideas, and reflections on anything from academic minutia (software issues & solutions, work habits, academic culture) to ecological theory relating to biodiversity and socio-economic aspects of biodiversity. Mostly, this is for my own interest and reference, but I hope others will find some of this useful and offer their own thoughts where appropriate.

Feel free to comment on almost any post, just please keep it somewhat professional and on-topic. You can send me a message to contact me privately or off-topic.