At Fairbanks, intensive investigations are being made on disturbed areas in which a 200-m 

 section of heated pipe has been buried to serve as a model for heat flow calculation by Alyeska. 

 Revegetation studies are being conducted over the pipe. The pipe passes through two ecological 

 zones, a drier white birch {Betula papyrifera) forest and a wetter white (Picea glauca) and black 

 (Picea mariana) spruce forest. Extensive base-line studies have been carried out in the adjacent 

 undisturbed wooded areas through the Tundra Biome Program (Fig. 36). 



In the first summer of base-line studies of the sites from Fairbanks to Prudhoe, it was not 

 possible to achieve any degree of completeness in investigations at any one site. Therefore, rather 

 than treating the bioenvironmental gradient site by site, this section of the report will follow the 

 outline of the previous sections by detailing status of research progress by ecosystem components: 

 abiotic, producer, consumer, and decomposer-nutrients. 



Key 



MICROMETEOROLOGY TOWERS 



SOIL NUTRIENT AND 



DECOMPOSER SURVEY 



Figure 36. Location map of study sites adjacent to the hot-pipe disturbed area. 



98 



