July has come and gone, and now it is time for the highlights!
Earlier this month I was able to join forces with the Lolo National Forest Weeds/Invasives Team in collaboration with the Montana Biological Weed Control Coordination Project. We netted Oberea and Flea Beetles in a large field, then sorted/packaged them up into cups to be put on ice for transportation.
Separation method for Flea BeetlesBugs on Ice!Co-worker Josie, The Bug QueenDay 1 of Biocontrol Project
The following day I joined the weeds team again on a scouting and biocontrol float trip along the Clark Fork River. We mapped Leafy Spurge populations and then released our bugs on the populations. We targeted these populations specifically since they were isolated from roads by the river. This makes the leafy spurge not only difficult to get to, but inadequate to treat with herbicides due to its proximity to the river. It was a beautiful day for floating, and it was my first time on the Clark Fork River! It sure is handy to have an ex-raft guide supervisor! Overall a super cool project I was able to be a part of.
Oberea being releasedDay 2 of Biocontrol Project
Another exciting collaboration this month was being able to work with local youth crews in both the Missoula and Superior District areas to teach them about seed collection and rare plant surveys. Being able to meet local high schoolers excited about nature and working outside made for a fulfilling week of seed collecting. Having extra hands to help with seed collection wasn’t too bad either! It has been great being able to work with other ranger districts and learning more about different areas of the forest.
YCC Superior Crew collecting PEAL11YCC loves collecting seeds!
And finally… One of the best parts of July has been getting to know one specific local plant Vaccinium membranaceum!!! The huckleberry patches I have stumbled upon while scouting for seed have been a much needed break during long days in the field.
Summer means everyone is busy here in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. The office has been mostly empty in the middle of the work days because most folks are out in the field. The flowers are filling the hillsides and just when I think the landscapes couldn’t possibly get more colorful, more beautiful, more diverse more comes into bloom. The land managers, the flowers, the wildlife are all busy making the most of the summer.
You know how there are just those plants that really catch your attention, that you see just rarely enough that you have time to miss them, and yet you see just frequently enough to remain hopeful to see them? Well, I’ve gotten to see some old friends again this season and I’ve gotten to finally see in person a few that I had only previously seen pictures of. Some of my favorites that I’ve seen this month are a mariposa lily, elephant head lousewort, and glacier lily.
…mine eyes have seen the GLORIA
I just returned from a lovely weekend in the Lemhi mountains for our local GLORIA project where I had the chance to work with a number of very knowledgeable botanists at various stages in their careers. A few of these botanists are retired and volunteer their time to this and various other botany project because they believe in the importance of and enjoy this work.
Setting up the survey area by laying out string along each cardinal and intercardinal direction.
I wanted to use this blog to do some of my own research on the background and scope of GLORIA. GLORIA, by the way, stands for Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments. I found a lot of great information online and everything I’ve summarized below comes from the primary GLORIA website: https://www.gloria.ac.at/home. It is a a global project to monitor alpine habitats over time to track the effect of climate change on alpine plant communities. The alpine is an interesting environment to collect data on for a few reasons. One is because it remains largely unaffected by other human-caused factors as it tends to have relatively low human traffic and land use. Another interesting factor is that mountain areas contain a disproportional high amount of biodiversity compared to the amount of land this habitat covers. Alpine habitat is particularly sensitive as the plant communities living there will not have much in the way of suitable substitute habitat while other species ranges are beginning to shift upwards in elevation and are beginning to encroach into alpine plant communities current habitat.
Surveying one square meter plots five vertical meters below the summit point.
One particularly interesting concept that came up while I was learning more about GLORIA is the idea of extinction debt. It describes a phenomenon where a local extinction may lag significantly behind the occurrence of habitat destruction or degradation (Kuusaari et al, 2009). This means that species may be occupying an environment that is already unsuitable for them and that they will not be able to continue to occupy (Dullinger et al, 2012). This is dangerous because when we see a species surviving in a disturbed area we are likely to assume that this means the species is more resilient than it is truly able to be or the the habitat change isn’t as impactful as it actually will turn out to be. These incorrect assumptions could lead to complacency and misinformed land management and policy decisions.
An earlier sign of local extinction than range shifting or shrinking is a decreased population size (Cotto et al, 2017). A big part of the GLORIA protocol is to create a comprehensive plant list for every summit surveyed and to estimate abundance of each plant. GLORIA is creating a long-term, standardized database of alpine plant communities that can provide us with vital information for addressing this issue, as well as many other conservation concerns for alpine areas.
Can you read that?
Some article I extracted information from.
Cotto, O., Wessely, J., Georges, D. et al. A dynamic eco-evolutionary model predicts slow response of alpine plants to climate warming. Nat Commun8, 15399 (2017).
Dullinger, S. et al. Extinction debt of high-mountain plants under twenty-first-century climate change. Nature Climate Change2, 619–622 (2012).
Kuussaari, M. et al. Extinction debt: A challenge for biodiversity conservation. Trends in Ecololgy & Evolution24, 564–571 (2009).
Clouds come and go, but the mountains remain. The dew point temperature in the morning is typically always reached here with the cooler mornings. The increased condensation in the atmosphere makes the mountains invisible, as the surrounding clouds block your view for miles. But now that we’ve finally had 70 degree days up here, the warming temperature deviates from the dew point temperature, and all the clouds evaporate to leave a stunning view. This is one of the best ways to experience the Alaskan alpine hikes, almost as if mother nature is revealing a secret to you.
Waterfall at the top of Palmer Lakes TrailLost Lake Trail
These have been my favorite places to go on the Chugach, although the flowers are still barely emerging. As my eyes scan across the land, surprisingly it is the smallest plants that catch my attention. Drosera angelica, the English Sundew, is inconspicuously about 5 cm tall and found in most peatbogs in Southcentral Alaska. This interesting character is a carnivorous plant, that uses leaves covered in red mucilaginous glands with a resin tip to lure in their prey. Once the unlucky insect is trapped, the tentacle like structures then bend toward the prey and center of the leaf to maximize contact. This unique adaptation is a survival technique to live in nitrogen deficient areas, such as bogs.
Close up of the glands and resin drops of the English Sun Dew
Another plant we had to get down on our hands and knees to search for is the rare Aphragmus eschscholtzianus, or Aleutian Cress. This mustard is so small, it was first described in the last 75 years. One of the terrestrial crew’s projects is to monitor the subalpine valleys saturated with snowmelt to observe long-term population change. This involves going to previously mapped plots, finding due north and due east from a monument stake, measuring a 5×4 m plot, and using quadrats to measure Aleutian Cress abundance in a given area of the plot. This work also involved traversing the hillslopes off trail to ideal habitat areas to find new populations. At first I hated it, as this work is like finding a needle in a very large haystack. After hiking all day, our crew finally found a population of about 5, giving us all a euphoria and sense of accomplishment. I thought I could rule out rare plant monitoring from my career goals but instead, this experience has only made me more indecisive.
Aleutian cress monitoring at Palmer Lakes Trail. The road to this site was just opened up last week due to an avalanche.
