Operations and Maintenance Support for Kluane Lake Research Station, Yukon

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Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS) has been operating in Yukon Territory since 1961, providing a platform for a rich array of long-running research programs in Earth, environmental, and biological sciences. The station is located in the foothills of the St Elias Mountains, Canada’s highest mountain range, connecting researchers to a dynamic environment at the junction of northern alpine, boreal forest, and lacustrine ecosystems. The environment surrounding KLRS and the long-term ecological and glaciological research programs supported by the station are unique within Canada. KLRS is the only western Canadian research station in the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic. The station is open from April until September each year, but also opens up periodically in the winter season to assist research projects. Facilities include a kitchen and accommodation for up to 40, lab space, communications infrastructure, an airstrip, and summer resource staff for field logistics. KLRS supports research groups and field schools from across Canada and the international research community. A total of 25 different institutions used the facility from 2013-2016, including 12 different Canadian universities, Yukon College, government scientists, and universities in the U.S., Finland, Sweden, the U.K., and Germany. Current research threads at KLRS include cross-cutting projects in herbivore ecology (e.g., population cycles; behavioural and physiological responses to environmental stress), vegetation dynamics (e.g., shrub-tree interactions; treeline response to climate change; role of shrubs in soil development in the alpine), ecotoxicology, lake hydrology, glacier hydrology and dynamics, cryosphere-climate processes, environmental reconstructions from lake sediments and ice cores, and remote sensing and climate downscaling studies for modelling of landscape response to climate change. All projects have a strong component of student training, in an exciting multidisciplinary milieu. The long-term research that is enabled by KLRS is of regional and international significance, as researchers, communities, governments, and stakeholders work to understand and quantify environmental change. Methods and discoveries based out of KLRS are widely adopted, for instance by the international community working to measure and model vegetation and glacier response to climate change, and the associated impacts on the global carbon cycle and sea level. Few places in the world offer access to such a dynamic landscape, with the opportunity to study environmental processes and interactions while maintaining long-term experiments and monitoring efforts. The scientific value of such studies and the stations that enable them cannot be over-stated.