This time it will work
by Mack Baysinger
Or back to Bauhaus we’ll go
Mostly, its Bauhaus
Especially at the start of a frosty morning, it was mesmerizing to take in the scene of the wetland blanketed by an undulating quilt of green, red, and amber Sphagnum mosses. It was a beautiful field site to work in, but we weren’t there just to ooo and ahhh at the beauty of the pristine Finnish bog (though we spent plenty of time doing that too).
The waterlogged, organic-rich soils of the world’s wetlands represent the largest natural source of methane to the Earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, they also take in a massive amount of carbon and keep it stored in their soils. Wetlands have historically taken in more carbon than released it to the atmosphere, making them an important carbon sink. Our current climate models still struggle to represent exactly how wetland carbon dynamics will change in a warming future, especially during the shoulder seasons. In boreal and arctic wetlands, this knowledge gap can be largely attributed to the fact that most measurements are gathered during the summer.
With a sampling campaign that stretched across weeks, we aimed to capture how a peatland system’s carbon and nutrient dynamics change as the highly photosynthetic summer turns to (a debatably) dormant winter. I was eager to start the field work, while also a little nervous about spending all day in the middle of the woods, with a peer I didn’t know so well. My field partner was another first-year PhD student who I knew only through the dizzyingly long chains we had sent back and forth, as we cobbled together a sampling plan for the summer.
Turns out, the nerves were completely unnecessary. The fascinating field site, the lively forestry research station we were based at, and the many highs and lows of field work gave us a lot to talk about. However, as with most scientific endeavors, the biggest challenges are the ones you have no way of anticipating…
When we realized that the first few days of greenhouse gas measurements were failing the data quality checks, we scrambled to troubleshoot our setup. The most obvious weak link in our instrumentation was the measurement chamber.
A measurement chamber is a hollow cylinder with one opening on the bottom, similar in size and shape to a 5-gallon bucket. We had brought a smaller, hand-crafted chamber made of plastic and silicone sealant as we needed it to be nimble enough to operate with one hand while guiding a single sedge into the chamber without damaging the delicate plant.
During a measurement, the concentration of gas inside the measurement chamber is read by an instrument that reads how much methane and carbon dioxide is being exchanged between the plant and the atmosphere: essentially we were measuring the system ‘breathing’ in real time.
After we found that there was likely a leak from the chamber’s seal with one of its many instrument accessories it attached to, we decided we probably needed a whole lot more than the kitchen scissors, duct tape and pack of loose bandaids that we brought as a ‘repair kit’. So, we made our first trip to the nearest hardware store, Bauhaus.
Each troubleshooting trial brought a fresh crop of problems–and proposed solutions–but inevitably, all roads led us back to Bauhaus. We eventually ran out of time (and industrial silicone sealant) and decided to lay the single-plant measurement chamber to rest for the season. But, the floor plan of the Bauhaus in Tampere, Finland will always be etched in my mind.
Further reading:
Although the single plant measurements weren’t successful in our first season, we had a second (much larger) chamber that we used for a series of measurements on experimental vegetation removal plots. This was the subject of an earlier Sciku, published Jan. 15, 2026. With the larger chamber’s measurements, we found that methane emissions from peatlands are likely underestimated in shoulder and cold-seasons as we can’t yet tease out separate components of methane dynamics (production, oxidation, and transport through plants and their roots).
‘Shoulder season controls on methane emissions from a boreal peatland’, 2024, Jentzsch, K., et al., Biogeosciences, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-3761-2024
Our field site, Siikaneva bog, is the site of many ongoing scientific efforts from research groups all over the world. Linked here are short videos of our lab group giving ‘tours’ of the bog: https://www.awi.de/en/science/geosciences/permafrost-research/research-focus/energy-and-waterbalance/galleries/finland-2022.html
If you’re curious about what a greenhouse gas measurement looks like in the field, here is a short video from Cornell’s Animal Science lab setting up a manual chamber measurement in an agricultural field. Notably, we did not use the ‘smart’ chamber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIXUcinpP8U
Author bio:
Mack Baysinger (she/they) is a postdoctoral researcher with Aarhus University. Her work explores high-latitude biogeochemical cycling, with a focus on peatland and permafrost systems. She can be found on Bluesky @mack-baysinger.bsky.social
Read another sciku by Mack: ‘Russian Peat Corer’.
