Jenn Johnson, of Harrison, an Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School instructional coach and teacher, shows a sketch note she created for her upcoming PolarTREC research trip to the Arctic. She left Friday. Nicole Carter / Advertiser Democrat
PARIS — When classes resume at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in late summer, a little bit of the Arctic will be waiting to engage students and educators alike.
Jenn Johnson, high school instructional coach and educator, is spending the next several weeks as part of a team studying the impact of small rodents, like lemmings, have on vegetation of the Arctic tundra. She will serve as an assistant on a four-person team collecting samples from grazing areas of animals from lemmings to caribou and the effect their populations have on carbon cycles.
Johnson is one of 11 teachers chosen from more than 300 applicants from across the country to participate in PolarTREC, a series of scientific expeditions that take place in the Arctic and Antarctica. PolarTREC is funded by the National Science Foundation.
The team Johnson joined in early 2020 was set to travel to the Yukon. After pandemic delays, including Canada’s border closure, the team was redirected to a different experiment at Utqiagvik in Alaska. Utqiagvik is one of the world’s most northern cities but less remote than Yukon Canada.
“Jennie McLaren is my principal investigator,” Johnson said. “She is a biologist at the University of Texas. That is who I’ll be working with. I’ve known her for two years. We are on a regular texting basis because we’ve been waiting for so long to go. She is spearheading this particular site at Utqiagvik. Most people have known it as Barrow, but more recently it was changed back to the indigenous name for the area.”
Johnson is the second Maine educator heading out on a PolarTREC expedition. Her friend and a former colleague from Edward Little High School in Auburn, Erin Towns, was accepted into the program at the same time and spent three weeks this past May in western Greenland studying glacier dynamics.
“Dr. McLaren has been working on a long-term, international project,” Johnson said. “Her team is seeking to add to the body of knowledge regarding how herbivores impact the nutrient cycle of the tundra. This will ultimately help with projections of carbon cycling.”
Johnson’s work will take place in three experiment stations. The control area will be open to all grazing tundra animals. A second is fenced to exclude large mammals like caribou from accessing. The third will exclude small animals like lemmings.
She said similar experiments are being done in different parts of the world and will be put to the same measurements.
“One-third of the world’s soil carbon is stored in Arctic soil,” Johnson said. “As things warm and get greener, Dr. Mclaren wants to help understand how the tundra will change in regard to carbon sequestration in soil. We will compare spaces that animals can access to those they can’t, to study the difference.”
Johnson’s primary role at Utqiagvik will be to support McLaren’s work in the field. That field work will be an invaluable bonus for Oxford Hills high school students next fall. She is teaching a climate policy course that will feature samples and data she gathers and is making it available to educators at other Oxford Hills schools.
“The real work starts when I get back,” Johnson said. I will bring tangible, real-life experience back to my school district and get people really excited and invested in climate research and, even more importantly, solutions.
“Dr. McLaren will be available to our students and teachers through Zoom. She’s the real expert and she is very willing to address them on the work she is doing.”
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