GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- When conducting research on a small piece of untilled North Dakota prairie, researchers from the University of North Dakota were careful not to disturb the land too much, to the point of carrying all of their equipment by hand or on sleds.
"We try to be as low impact as possible," geography professor Bradley Rundquist said.
Last summer, staff put a high tech camera on the school's Oakville Prairie, only to have it malfunction due to issues with its battery.
Now, the PhenoCam camera is back, and a new weather station was also installed nearby two weeks ago, giving researchers a real-time view and analysis of climate change.
"It's watching the plants; it's a proxy measure of what's happening with the climate," Rundquist said.
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Oakville Prairie, a 960-acre piece of land about seven miles west of Grand Forks that is spotted with asters and false sunflowers, was spared from partial ruin when the Sandpiper pipeline was rerouted so as to not disturb the area.
The land hosts more than 230 species of plants and is ideal for research because it hasn't ever been tilled.
"It's nice to have undisturbed prairie out there to work in, definitely," Rundquist said. "We were concerned about the impact of heavy equipment."
With the weather station, researchers and the students who assist them have access to the prairie's air and soil temperatures, wind speed and direction, and humidity levels every 15 minutes.
Comparing this data to photos of what the grass looks like physically gives the researchers, over time, a better idea of when the growing season starts and ends, as well as the ability to monitor its changes over years.
The weather station is from UND's Biology Department, where it sat unused for some time until being assembled recently into a short structure that looks like a metal telephone pole.
The camera, which looks like a typical security camera attached to a 12-volt battery, comes from the geography department's agreement with AmericaView, a program the school has received funding from for a decade.
AmericaView provides these cameras to entities all over the world, but Rundquist said the one in Oakville Prairie is unique because it's gathering data from flat lands.
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"Most of the other ones are on the East Coast in trees and forested areas, so the grassland was something they were looking to fill in and provide information."
Brett Goodwin, an associate professor of biology and biology department chairman, said this kind of collaboration is common for the two departments, but UND as a whole has recently made a push to see more.
"The Oakville Prairie project has become one of the biggest collaborations we've had," he said.
Goodwin said starting in September researchers have also begun controlled burns on the prairie to study its effects.
"We're looking at how the plants and birds and insects respond a year later, so having the weather data to put on top of that is really nice," he said.
One of the goals of the project is to make all of its research public. Imagery collected by the camera can be viewed online at bit.ly/1SUnstP
