Boreal Forest Soils Lab Facilities

We are a shared use facility at UAF, and we are located in 335 O'Neill on the UAF Troth Yeddha campus.

Staff, students, and faculty can access drying ovens, fume hoods, exetainer evacuation line, bench space, glassware, balances (precision and coarse scale), soil preparation room, soil grinder, digester, and ball mill for fine sample grinding.

The lab's analytical capacity includes Agilent Technologies 4200 MP-AES, Ankom 200 Fiber Analyzer, and LECO that can analyze solid organic samples for carbon and nitrogen content. 

With a USDA equipment grant awarded to Young-Robertson, we purchased a Delta V Plus Mass Spectrometer that can analyze gas, solid and liquid samples for carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur. This instrument includes an Elemental Analyzer, ConFlo IV Universal Interface, autosampler for liquid water, Gas Bench II, combustion furnace, and ESL NWR213 Laser ablation system. The laser ablation system expands our ability to analyze small samples (like tree rings on a sub-annual scale, hair, small sections of leaves, etc) for carbon isotope composition.

Access is with permission only, so please reach out to Sam Dempster (sldempster@alaska.edu) and Matt Robertson (mrober57@alaska.edu) if you need to arrange to use the lab facility. Fees are associated with the use of the soil grinder and for elemental/stable isotope analyses.