Reading & Listening to Cape Cod

Cape Cod does not appear on my CV. I study alpine plant ecology — my postdoc research is literally founded on carrying heavy things to high lakes — and the hooked peninsula of the Cape, curling into Nantucket Sound and pointing back towards Boston Harbor, is mostly beach and salt marsh and very light on high ground. 

When I’m on the Atlantic coast, I am in Acadia National Park. I grew up in central Massachusetts, where by law I think every baby shower must include a hardcover copy of Make Way For Ducklings and every childhood needs one bad sunburn from a Cape Cod beach (mine was Hyannis Port). But while I haven’t thought much about the landscape of the Cape in years (haven’t visited since 2014), this past week two journalism projects brought me back and reminded me of the Cape’s outsized influence on my own career in ecology. 

First, the Cape was recently featured in a short documentary and intensely immersive online news story. Reporters from The Boston Globe spent several months this summer researching the effects of climate change on Cape Cod. They interviewed scientists, fishermen, locals, and business owners, and followed the stories of salt marshes, beach erosion, nor’easters, and changing fisheries. Nestor Ramos’ story, “At the Edge of a Warming World,” is a stunning and thorough look at climate change across the Cape, from Bourne to Provincetown. I’m teaching a course on the science of climate change for non-science majors and I rearranged my syllabus after The Boston Globe published this story. That is how much I love these pieces — five weeks into teaching a revamped course, just as I had settled into the semester, I threw out completed lesson plans so that I could devote a whole class to “At the Edge of a Warming World”. The documentary and the immersive video-and-photography online experience of Ramos’ story are only available to The Boston Globe subscribers, but you can read the story at the Pulitzer Center website — it’s part of the Center’s Connected Coastlines Initiative supporting reporting on climate change in coastal communities. 

Early in “At the Edge of a Warming World” you are introduced to Liam’s, a clam shack that stood on Nauset beach since the 1950’s, and the March 2018 Nor’easter that wiped away 80 feet of beach and damaged the understructure beneath the restaurant. The building, once set way back from the ocean, barely survived the storm and the town tore it down later in the spring. Several students in my class shared their memories of Liam’s. There was this sense that a lost clam shack suddenly brought five weeks of reading and figures from the Fourth National Climate Assessment into focus. Climate change became intensely personal. The documentary is full of these moving interviews and powerful images from the Cape. I’ve never been to Liam’s, but I felt a similar nostalgia watching the ornithologists banding whimbrels in Wellfleet salt marshes.

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but it is the first place I tried field biology. Wellfleet is a part of that geography. I can’t even remember the actual field lab assignment, but in the summer of 2000 I stood ankle-deep in cordgrass and I’ve been a field biologist ever since. 

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but I’m beginning to think it should be. My first field course was a summer marine biology program in high school with field trips to Cape Cod and the Maine coast. Looking back, the Maine coast obviously looms large — I’m currently a Second Century Stewardship Fellow at Acadia National Park. But the Cape Cod trip was foundational. I remember reading about the dance of ice sheets, morraines, and outwash plains in the USGS booklet Geologic History of Cape Cod and it was my first inkling that geology was ephemeral, that kettle hole ponds might hold clues to unravel the history of a place. 

I loved that summer course, but at the time it was hard for me to untangle my interest in field science from the general feeling of satisfaction that two of my best friends and I had engineered a way to spend the summer together, mostly outdoors, while our parents thought we were being “productive.” None of us became marine biologists. We stayed in touch with our teacher though, and in March he emailed me to say that he had a current student working on an independent project on shark, seal, and human interactions in the Cape Cod waters. This student was writing an op-ed for the Cape Cod Times, and would I mind reading it over and offering feedback? This is how I learned about the proposed seal cull, a scheme to reduce the food supply (and thus the local populations) of great white sharks. By "simply" re-writing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal cull would supposedly reduce shark attacks on the Cape. (The op-ed was published in April, by the way, and I think Emma did a great job!) 

I had mostly forgotten about those spring emails and Emma’s op-ed until I began listening to Outside/In’s episode “Cold, Dark, and Sharky.” Again, I had the feeling that I possessed Cape-specific expertise that I hadn't fully appreciated, only this time it was about sharks, seal culls, and the author of Jaws. Outside/In is a podcast produced by NHPR and the Cape Cod episode dropped the day before The Boston Globe published “At the Edge of a Warming World”, but I didn’t start listening until the day I taught the Globe’s documentary short in class. When I started playing "Cold, Dark, and Sharky" on my walk back to the T after teaching I couldn’t believe the serendipitous connection — I had just spent a week re-writing my syllabus and crafting a lesson plan around climate change on Cape Cod and now I was basking in the glow of a well-taught class and listening to a new extremely well-produced story about Cape Cod. 

I have another ecological connection to the Cape. My senior year of college, I took a two-semester biology seminar called Biological Conservation on Cape Cod and the Islands. The seminar was taught by a postdoc (I haven't read this PNAS paper, but I agree that postdocs are stellar mentors). I enrolled because my major (Environmental Science and Public Policy) was biology-adjacent, my friend wanted to take it and I’d already bailed on a different seminar with her*, and there would be field trips.

This seminar taught me how to read a scientific paper (laying the foundation for #365papers, one Wednesday night meeting at a time), how to core a tree, prep the core, and measure the rings with meticulous, old school — we’re talking dissecting scope and ruler-style — precision. I learned about paleoecology and palynology and the glacial geology lessons that I’d first encountered in my high school marine biology lesson slowly resurfaced. It took another decade, but eventually I did become a paleoecologist. But first, I’d reunite with the postdoc who taught that seminar; he became a professor at Emerson College. He hired me as an affiliated faculty to teach Climate Change in 2014 while I worked on my dissertation. I returned to teach Climate Change again this fall, adding Cape Cod to the syllabus.

Looking back, it appears that Cape Cod is the landscape that circuitously led me to Emerson — and perhaps my entire career? — in the first place. Reading “At the Edge of a Warming World” and listening to “Cold, Dark, and Sharky” back-to-back has been an incredible experience. There are few more nostalgia-inducing moments than teaching your first field sites to the next generation of students. But, to be able to teach with science journalism that is so deep, so well-researched, and so beautifully produced is a whole new level of nostalgia. All the emotions associated with your place are heightened and replayed in hi-fi.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took the landscape of the Cape and the thorny, tangled relationships between people and nature in this place, and brought it all to life. I found myself remembering an esker where I ate a half-stale muffin from the bottom of my backpack, the tourist trap in Provincetown where I got a henna tattoo of the sun on my shoulder, the bakery where we stopped on the way to the ferry to core dwarf beech trees, the low light in the New Bedford whaling museum and the bright sand dunes outside.

When I tell my origin story about how I became an ecologist, I usually talk about hiking in New Hampshire, or the childhood trip when my grandparents took me to Acadia**. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Cape Cod in those conversations. Clearly, I need to fact check my own origin story. I’m too completely in the choir to be the target audience for either “At the Edge of a Warming World” or “Cold, Dark, and Sharky”. In other words, I wasn’t surprised by the reporting; I was already familiar with most of the science in both stories. I had heard that you could earn a dollar per nose during the seal bounty days, understood that the waters around Cape Cod are warming faster than 99% of the rest of the ocean, knew that climate change made Nor’easters more powerful. But, I recognize that I am a weird case — the occasional academic Cape Cod enthusiast who has apparently forgotten, or maybe just never appreciated, the instrumental role of the Cape landscape in her scientific training. The power of the storytelling was so apparent when my students talked about their reactions to “At the Edge of a Warming World”.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took these semi-familiar landscapes and crafted these stories that allowed me to see the Cape again from new perspectives. To have your original field site professionally science communicated back to you — twice! — is a really wonderful and jarring experience. I already appreciated the hard work of science communication in general, but these two stories impressed me in super-specific, place-based, deeply authentic ways. Read and listen to them — and support your own local science journalists. They may just help you re-write your CV. 

*I very much regret bailing on the other seminar — it was taught by Amitav Ghosh, and the Ibis Trilogy later became my three favorite books. My friend took both seminars; I totally could have double-seminar-ed too. Sorry, Rachel! You were right! 

**The summer after my grandparents took me to Acadia, they rented a house in Hyannis for week and what I'm learning from writing this post is that my grandmother spent my childhood picking out future field sites for me.

PLOS Stands with #ClimateStrike

Last Friday, PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt published a letter declaring that PLOS supports the Global Climate Strike on September 20, 2019. She wrote, “Their global call to action is meant to apply pressure on policymakers and drive change as world leaders gather on September 23rd at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Thousands of scientists worldwide have signed letters endorsing the climate strikes, and we stand with them. We are giving all PLOS staff the opportunity to take the day and march to raise their voice for change.” 

The Global Climate Strike is the latest outcome of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s call for school strikes. Her #FridaysforFuture movement encouraged children to strike, skip school, or organize protests to call attention to climate destruction. They write “why study for a future, which might not be there? Why spend a lot of effort to become educated, when our governments are not listening to the educated?” 

Some in our broader community of academia have already offered public support for the school strikes; The Guardian published an open letter signed by 224 academics in February 2019. Friday’s Global Climate Strike asks all adults to stand in solidarity with the young activists and #FridaysforFuture movement. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) published An Adult’s Guide to the Climate Strike on their blog last week. Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a senior analyst in UCS Climate and Energy program, writes,

When I was around Greta’s age, climate change was already in the news and on my mind. But unlike today, we had time then to arrest the problem, bend the upward curve our emissions were on, and avert really dangerous changes and impacts. And unlike Greta and today’s young climate activists, I had great confidence that we would do it. Anything else would be insane, disastrous, unthinkable. But here we are, several decades later.

My experience echoes Spanger-Siegfried’s — I believed the adults would take care of things. I never thought that the future I was studying for would not be there, even as I started a PhD tracking the ecological effects of climate change on plant communities. This is, I think, a weird disconnect in retrospect. I am old enough to have grown up with climate optimism, but young enough to have never asked myself, When did you realize you work on climate change? because the answer was obvious. 

PLOS and The Union of Concerned Scientists represent the growing assembly of adults standing with #ClimateStrike. PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt’s letter references PLOS-published climate change research — this publicly accessible repository of climate change knowledge stands as a symbol for how much we know about climate change. Our soapbox of research is needed on Friday. As ecologists, we can stand next to Greta and her generation. We invested a lot of effort to become educated and to fill PLOS with our research papers, now let’s spend the effort to be heard and to make space for the #ClimateStrike generation to join us in the field and in the lab in the future.

Find a Climate Strike near you.

Read more (&more!) climate change in the media from this week's global journalism initiative Covering Climate Now. 

A Drought By Any Other Name

What is a drought? I know I don’t know — I live in the temperate northeastern United States and my field site is frequently wrapped in fog — but I get the feeling that I am not alone. According to a paper born from a Colorado State University graduate student seminar on ecology and drought, we should all be asking ourselves this question.

Drought seems to have lost its meaning for ecologists, and not in the semantic satiation way, where if you say a word over and over again it become aural nonsense. Ingrid J. Slette and her co-authors published ‘How ecologists define drought, and why we should do better’ in Global Change Biology this summer. As Slette tells it, “This project grew out of discussions during a grad student seminar course about ecology and drought. Everyone in the class approached drought from a different perspective, and when we looked to the literature to find a definition of drought that we could all agree on as a starting point for the class, we couldn't find one.” The class decided they needed to take a step back, and they shifted from synthesizing the impacts of drought to simply defining it. This might seem like a trivial point of semantics, but as they write in their paper, “Failure to define or characterize drought conditions in the published literature challenges out ability to advance ecological understanding.” You can’t compare studies, or compile a meta-analysis without understanding the idiosyncratic environmental conditions hidden under the catch-all term ‘drought.’

Perhaps we should not be surprised that ecologists can’t agree on drought; as I discovered while reading Slette’s paper, meteorologists and climatologists also struggle to define drought. But, the sticking point is not that we don’t have a clear definition of drought, it’s that ecologists use the term ‘drought’ in the literature as if we do. When Slette and her team surveyed 564 publications from the last fifty years of drought research, less than a third of the papers explicitly defined drought or cited a definition of drought. In addition, they report: “ecologists most often use the term drought as a synonym for generally dry conditions (~30% of papers). In other words, authors state they are studying drought without quantifying and/or contextualizing how dry conditions are relative to normal (e.g., by reporting stardardized index values, or some measure of deviation from average conditions).”

But wait, it gets even juicer — it turns out that hand-waving about drought may be distracting ecologists from noticing the actual climatic conditions at their study sites.Slette and her coauthors selected a subset of studies from their review that were (a) bad at defining drought, but (b) good at providing details about their geographic location. They pulled the location coordinates and timeframes of these studies to calculate Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) values using the Global SPEI database. Only half of the droughts in this subset were characterized by especially dry SPEI values, outside the range of normal climate variability for their ecosystem. They found that 87% of the drought studies took place during times that were drier than average for the study site, but 13% of these “drought” studies were from periods that were slightly wetter than average based on estimated SPEI values. And while there may have been extremely local conditions that were truly dry at some of these "wet-droughts", we don't know because the authors did not report on them or place them within the context of the local long-term climate records. 

I asked Slette about the review process for this paper. I had seen on twitter that it was her first publication as a lead author, and I wondered if journal editors had recognized the importance of this topic. I assumed that Slette may have faced the same challenges as authors of ‘advice papers’ who struggled to find the right home for their work. Both this paper and Dyson et al’s advice for urban ecologists working on private property had origin stories in graduate students creating the resources that they were searching for early in their careers. Slette and her seminar wanted a straightforward ecological definition on drought and couldn’t find it. Slette wrote, “I anticipated that it would be quite difficult to get this paper published, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by how well the editors and reviewers received it. Choosing to submit this paper as an Opinion was an important decision in terms of finding a good home for it, I think that turned out to be a better fit for it than as a primary research article.” Then, I asked her about her own research, aside from writing sharp reviews of ecological literature. I wanted to know what definition of drought she used and how it had changed since writing her definition paper. Slette is a PhD candidate at CSU, and she answered, “I study how changing precipitation amounts and variability affect plant production. Specifically, I have been studying how experimentally-imposed extreme droughts affect plant root production and aboveground vs. belowground resource allocation in Central U.S. grasslands. For these experiments, drought was defined as a reduction in precipitation similar to what this area experienced during the Dust Bowl, about a 2/3 reduction from average. After writing this review paper, I am much more cognizant of all drought definitions, including my own. In every paper that I write from now on, I am definitely going to include more detail about the conditions of the drought itself, not just about its impacts.”

Finally, I asked her if the process of mining hundreds of papers for definitions of drought has made her a tougher reviewer or raised her standards for precise language from other ecologists. “I will definitely become a tougher reviewer now! I'm going to evaluate for precise wording and ask for lots of information about study design and justification.” I think that anyone who reads Slette’s paper will walk away with similar raised standards. And those of use who work in wet ecosystems should think about this too — we need to evaluate how we define our own work and what assumptions are hidden in our terms and jargon. As Slette notes, “I hope that the positive feedback and acceptance of this paper signals increased interest in (re)evaluating how ecologists define their work.”   

References:

Slette, I.J., Post, A.K., Awad, M., Even, T., Punzalan, A., Williams, S., Smith, M.D. and Knapp, A.K., 2019. How ecologists define drought, and why we should do better. Global Change Biology. 25(10), pp.3193-3200.

National Parks are Hot Spots

In this space, I’ve often shared my love for National Park-based research. I count myself among the researchers devoting time and energy to documenting how climate change affects the ecosystems and natural resources in U.S. National Parks; we study everything from pikas to forests, Joshua trees to birds. But, the underlying rate of warming in these National Parks was not on my radar and I had not given much thought to the climate exposure of National Parks versus the rest of the United States. It turns out, the parks are literal hotspots on the landscape.

Last fall, Dr. Patrick Gonzalez and coauthors from the University of Wisconsin published ‘Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks’ in Environmental Research Letters. This study looked at historical and projected temperature and precipitation across all 417 U.S. National Parks. Between 1895 and 2010, mean annual temperature of the national park area increased at double the U.S. rate — parks warmed by 1.0°C (±0.2°C) per century, the rest of the U.S. land area by 0.5 °C.Dr. Gonzalez is a forest ecologist and Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Principal Climate Change Scientist of the U.S. National Park Service, but he answered my questions here under his Berkeley affiliation, not for the Park Service.

I asked why he wanted to study a spatial analysis of historical and projected climate across all 417 US National Parks. What was the motivation for expanding on the earlier work of researchers who presented similar findings for the 289 large parks in the National Park System system?

“Up until our research, the severity of climate change across all the US national parks was unknown.” Gonzalez writes. “The previous work had only looked at subsets of parks. I work at a national level and it is important for me to give national policy-makers scientific information that is robust and comprehensive. The time-consuming parts of the work were the individual analyses by park and the computational tasks of downscaling all available general circulation model output of future climate projections to 800 m spatial resolution, which had not previously been accomplished for the U.S.”

In addition to the climate exposure of National Parks, Gonzalez and his team considered climate velocities. Climate velocity is the speed at which a plant or animal will need to move, migrate, or disperse — usually north or upslope — to “catch up” to their climate as it changes. Gonzalez found an interesting paradox in climate velocities: the park lands have experienced extreme temperature and precipitation shifts, but they also show lower climate velocity than the U.S. as a whole. They point out that this does not mean that plants and animals in National Parks are not in peril: “The lower climate velocities in the national park area are an artifact of that indicator being calculated as horizontal movement of areas of constant climate. Climate velocity can underestimate exposure in mountains.”

The National Parks are more mountainous than the rest of the United States. This is a reflection of our unsystematic history of serendipitous-style protection; we collect the pretty places as national parks, without considering the underlying biophysical diversity, and mountains are very pretty places. So while moving a couple meters upslope might seem easier than moving hundred of meters north to track a suitable climate, this is often an oversimplification. “Despite the computational artifact, our results indicate that projected climate velocities in national parks could exceed maximum natural dispersal capabilities of many trees, small mammals, and herbaceous plants.” Gonzalez elaborates, “Any new protection of natural areas, whether close to or far from national parks, can add to global conservation of ecosystems for biodiversity and human well-being.”

I asked Gonzalez if he had any thoughts on how the research could be interpreted for park visitors. I wanted to know if there is an effort to get this work not just to park managers on the ground, but to interpretive staff as well. “For national park interpreters, I’ve given many presentations directly to staff in individual parks, including interpreters,” he says. “I encourage all U.S. National Park Service staff to speak about the robust science of climate change and its human cause, which points us to solutions to saving America’s most special places.”

Finally, I noticed that both this paper and the earlier National Park System climate exposure study, which covered 289 large parks, were published in open access journals. I asked if this was an intentional pattern and these research teams were hoping to reach managers who may not have access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Gonzalez confirmed that, “the open access of the journal of course enabled a much larger audience to directly download and read the original work. This greatly benefited national park staff and other natural resource managers, to whom we aimed to provide information useful for conservation under climate change. Intense interest immediately developed – people downloaded the pdf file more than once a minute in the first 24 hours of publication.”

But their outreach was not limited to open access journals. Gonzalez points out, “public media published over 40 individual stories, including in the Washington Post, on page 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle, on public radio stations, and on television." Gonzalez also wrote a concise summary for the website the Conversation. He says that the University of California, Berkeley, has greatly helped in the effort to reach natural resource managers by publicly posting the spatial data, and he directly provided customized analyses and maps for numerous individual national parks.

Finally, Gonzalez writes, "I just presented the results to the U.S. Congress in a hearing where I testified on human-caused climate change in U.S. national parks. The open access of the journal was critical, but we engaged a broader effort to widely communicate the science.”

Thank you to Dr. Gonzalez and his colleagues for providing the climate data that underlies so much ecological research across the National Park System! And thank you for modeling effective outreach and impressive science communication*! 

References:

Gonzalez, P., Wang, F., Notaro, M., Vimont, D. J., & Williams, J. W. (2018). Disproportionate magnitude of climate change in United States national parks. Environmental Research Letters, 13(10), 104001–13. http://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aade09

Monahan WB, Fisichelli NA (2014) Climate Exposure of US National Parks in a New Era of Change. PLoS ONE 9(7): e101302. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101302 Banner image: photos by Jodi Kurtz, Via Tsuji, and Gabriel Millos, Creative Commons 

*if I ever publish a paper that averages one pdf download every minute, I will throw the biggest party and give everyone temporary tattoos of the figures.

Summer Reading (Part 1)

We’re rushing out of the dog days of summer and into the start of a new semester — or in my case the start of parental leave, which is a little bit like embarking on a new semester at an unknown campus and while I completed the newborn syllabus three years ago, I have this sinking feeling that I don’t even know which classes I’m enrolled in yet. Regardless, I’m reflecting on my summer reading.

Over June, July, and August, I was all in on #365papers and I have a top ten list of scientific papers from these long summer days of slow reading. Because my “semester” might start at any moment, I’m breaking this post into two parts. First up: my favorite hot-off-the-press summer reads on mountains and phenology.

On Mountains

Think globally & way into the past…

1. Iglesias, V., Whitlock, C., Krause, T.R., Baker, R.G., 2018. Past vegetation dynamics in the Yellowstone region highlight the vulnerability of mountain systems to climate change. Journal of Biogeography 45, 1768–1780. doi:10.1111/jbi.13364

Fifteen pollen records covering 16,000 years and the 80,000 km2 mountainous Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem create an incredible review of elevational patterns of vegetation change in an iconic mountainous region. In this paper, Dr. Virginia Iglesias lays out the challenges of quanitifying pollen-vegetation relationships in mountain regions (aka what I didn’t know when I proposed my postdoc research) and then pulls in a staggering amount of modern and fossil pollen data to recreate the history of Yellowstone’s dominant conifers. These are stories of both stability and rapid change through past climatic changes with conservation implications for managers facing anthropogenic climate change. My favorite line: “The current vegetation distribution is, at best, a short and rather anomalous baseline for evaluating ecological responses to future climate change.” 

2. Elsen, P.R., Monahan, W.B., Merenlender, A.M., 2018. Global patterns of protection of elevational gradients in mountain ranges. PNAS 115, 6004–6009. doi:10.1073/pnas.1720141115

This study has it all: mountain biodiversity love, protected area planning, big data analysis, and beautifully designed maps of “elevational protection” across the globe. Full disclosure: Dr. Paul Elsen is a fellow Smith Fellow and I also got to see this paper as a speed talk at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in July. The bottom line is this: when you zoom out, most of the world’s mountain ranges are narrowly protected — we need conservation across elevation gradients to effectively protect species under climate change. 

On Phenology 

Wherever you get your phenology data (maybe from TV?) scientists are asking some really interesting questions about community composition, temporal dynamics, and the implications of climate change on interspecific relationships…

3. Carter, S.K., Saenz, D., Rudolf, V.H.W., 2018. Shifts in phenological distributions reshape interaction potential in natural communities. Ecology Letters 30, 133–9. doi:10.1111/ele.13081

Amphibian breeding phenology is not the kind of phenology that I study — I don’t install recorders at ponds to capture EPs of overnight breeding calls, I don’t log hours listening to the audio to identify twelve different amphibian species and record the number of individuals per species calling during each recording session, and I certainly have not done this tirelessly for fifteen years. But I’m so glad that Dr. Shannon Carter and her colleagues did because their ingenuous analysis of changes in the timing of calling between pairs of amphibian species has huge implications for how we — plant phenology people included! — study phenological mismatch. The overlap (or "phenological distributions") of amphibian breeding calls has shifted in weird and non-uniform ways, and metrics like ‘first day of calling’ or ‘median call date’ don’t capture these changes well. This is just a great analysis of a grinder ball dataset (8 ponds in Northeast Texas, monitored consistently over 15 years) which opens up a window to these big questions — How do we monitor phenology? What information do we need to know that temporal mismatch is occurring?

4. De Frenne, P., Van Langenhove, L., Van Driessche, A., Bertrand, C., Verheyen, K., Vangansbeke, P., 2018. Using archived television video footage to quantify phenology responses to climate change. Methods Ecol Evol 149, 1791–9. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.13024

Dr. Pieter De Frenne and his coauthors have received tons of press coverage (best sub-headline: "ignore the lycra—look at the flowers") for this incredibly photogenic work. They basically watched 200 hours of TV (old coverage of the Tour of Flanders), justified this as “research” by grabbing screen shots of 46 shrubs and trees from along the cycling course, and found surprisingly strong advances in the timing of spring leaf out and flowering in these plants over the years. This is, on one level, the opposite of Carter et al listening to frog calls for fifteen years — the phenology monitoring here is opportunistic and there is only a single metric each year (what was happening on the day they filmed the Tour). But as De Frenne points out at the end of the paper: “Probably the most promising way forward for phenology research is to better integrate all types of phenology data…observational time series, experimental manipulations of climate, herbarium records, historical surveys of vegetation, historical maps, repeat photographs and other, yet unexploited, sources such as television video footage from broadcast archives.” 

5. Winkler, D.E., Butz, R.J., Germino, M.J., Reinhardt, K., Kueppers, L.M., 2018. Snowmelt Timing Regulates Community Composition, Phenology, and Physiological Performance of Alpine Plants. Front. Plant Sci. 9, 631–13. doi:10.3389/fpls.2018.01140 

Dr. Daniel Winkler, PLoS ESA Reporting Fellow 2016, tweeted out his new paper in July and he had me at “community composition, phenology, and physiological performance of alpine plants.” My “alpine-ish” communities include true alpine on Katahdin, but also Cadillac Mountain in Acadia, which is a whopping 1,530’ and more accurately described as ‘Northern Appalachian-Acadian Rocky Heath Outcrop’ by NatureServe. I’m definitely interested in the differences between alpine-restricted species and wide-ranging species. Winkler’s team recorded species diversity, flowering phenology, and physiological measurements including gas exchange, net CO2 assimilation, and stomatal conductance across plots along an elevation and aspect gradient in the Colorado Rockies. Two results jumped out at me: the alpine-specialists displayed less flexible flowering phenologies than the wide-ranging species, but there were not strong differences between these groups in physiology. This is the kind of paper that inspires mad grant writing — I'm interested but skeptical, will this hold up in my pet region/ecosystem/study system? I want to replicate this kind of research in the Northeast — and across a gradient of sites where phenology is tied to snowmelt (true alpine areas of Katahdin and the Presidential range), and where the two are (I think) decoupled (Cadillac Mountain). Winkler and I wrote a blog post together in 2016, I think I can convince him to collaborate on a larger scale — and get him to New England! 

Bonus “Reads”

Recent podcast episodes tangentially related to recent blogging

• This American Life covers The Feather Thief. My review of the book.

• Outside/In reports on underrepresentation in outdoor gear (aka 'shrink it and pink it' does not make women happy shoppers, especially when we can't find our sizes, preferred styles, or performance level). This touches on some of the same themes — inclusion & diversity in the outdoors — as my response to “Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method”

Pikas Meet Cute: Two Subspecies, One National Park

The National Park Service is wrapping up celebrations on its 102nd anniversary this August. I’m unabashedly biased towards park science: my dissertation and my postdoc research are both Acadia-based, while cleaning out old papers last week I actually paused for a moment before recycling a torn up, coffee-stained copy of a National Park research permit from 2013. (Don't worry, the original pdf is safely stored on an external hard drive.)

I’d report on the hybridization of pikas in Rocky Mountain National Park even without the excuse of a belated happy birthday to the National Park Service, but clearly covering research on pikas and #poopscience is the perfect way to honor the stewards of our public lands. There are charismatic megafauna (mini-fauna?) and there are charismatic landscapes, and the scientists who study pikas in the western National Parks enviably have cornered the market on both. Dr. Jessica Castillo Vardaro just published new research on the population genetics of American pikas in PLoS ONE last month. In “Identification of a contact zone and hybridization for two subspecies of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) within a single protected area” Castillo Vardaro and coauthors analyze the DNA in pika poop to pinpoint where the northern and southern Rocky Mountain lineages of these rabbit relatives meet. Their pika #poopscience spanned samples from Grand Teton National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park, and Rocky Mountain National Park.

Before Castillo Vardaro’s work, there was some evidence that the northern and southern Rocky Mountain pika subspecies had a historic contact zone somewhere near-ish Rocky Mountain National Park. However, Castillo Vardaro wasn’t looking for a contact zone or hybrid pikas when she began working on the Pikas in Peril (PIP) project — a team of National Park Service staff and academic researchers. Pikas are a bit of poster child for climate change vulnerability — “a climate indicator species” — because they cannot tolerate prolonged exposure to high temperatures. Castillo Vardaro’s initial genetic analyses of pika populations in western National Parks focused on signals of isolation by distance (IBD). She explains, “the further individuals are apart geographically, the less related they are genetically. Since pikas typically establish territories close to where they were born and mate with their neighbors, I expected to see strong signals of IBD. I did in all of my study sites except Rocky Mountain National Park (ROMO).” Comparisons of the pika samples and their sequences to Genbank showed that there were two genetic lineages represented in ROMO — Northern and Southern. Then, at a pika meeting (could there be a cuter meeting?) Castillo Vardaro met Preston Somers, a researcher who studied pika dialect in the Rockies in the 1970's. She notes, “His work suggested there might be a contact zone, but we were the first to actually show it and evidence of contemporary gene flow. So, we weren't initially interested in studying ROMO as a potential contact zone, but we are now.” The analyses in this research are steeped in #poopscience, or what the paper refers to as “fecal samples…through a combination of random, targeted, and opportunistic sampling.” I asked Castillo Vardaro about the trade offs of #poopscience versus tissue samples. As a plant ecologist, my Methods have never included gems like, “We avoided collecting old fecal pellets by preferentially collecting pellets with green plant material inside to avoid degraded DNA” — but I was curious to hear more. Castillo Vardaro expounded,

Fecal DNA is essentially the mucus and cells lining the digestive tract that then coat the fecal pellet as it passes through. There are very few cells compared to tissue (organ tissue or ear clips), there are other things present that can inhibit the PCR process like plant secondary compounds, and the feces has been sitting around outside for an unknown amount of time so the DNA can degrade. Each sample has to be genotyped multiple times to overcome the errors resulting from low quality/quantity DNA. My genotyping success rate was 50% - 75%, after removing samples that failed, contaminated samples, and multiple samples collected from the same individual unknowingly. That's a lot of work in the lab.

But, the #poopscience lab work pays off if you need lots of samples across a broad geographic area:

In contrast, I just got back from a week in Montana where I was helping my coauthor Chris Ray trap pikas at a site she has been monitoring for 30 years. In four days of effort (two trap days, but it takes a day to set up traps and a day to check traps/process pikas) we trapped 5 pikas. One person can collect 10-25 quality fecal samples in a day, plus anyone can collect fecal samples for genetic analyses after about 10 minutes of training. So while I would have preferred to have worked with tissue, there is no way to sample the number of individual pikas necessary for 10 high resolution genetic analyses if you had to trap every animal.

The collaborative nature of Castillo Vardaro’s research and the Pikas in Peril reminded me of an earlier blog post I wrote about the Biological Conservation paper “The importance of non-academic coauthors in bridging the conservation genetics gap.”  I noticed that Castillo Vardaro’s PLoS coauthors were all academics, but she pointed out that her coauthor and grad mentor, Clint Epps, designed the PIP project alongside National Park Service personnel and other academic researchers. “The questions, goals, and desired products were explicit from the beginning. These included National Park Service reports, summaries, briefs (publications on the web and available at the parks themselves), spatial data, and research that could be utilized in each of the parks.”

While Castillo Vardaro was doing field work, she worked with National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, interns, and volunteers. She noted, “we worked with interpretive staff to prepare the park specific resource briefs. We (myself, Clint Epps, and Doni Schwalm) also wrote a note on the potential effects of a proposed quarry site in Grand Teton National Park on the pika populations there, which was provided to resource managers there.” Basically, this work (one of Castillo Vardaro’s dissertation chapters) is the exception that proves the rule to the non-academic coauthors paper: here, the coauthor list belies the strong partnerships with non-academic scientists and managers, and if you didn’t know about Pikas in Peril, you might think wow, these academics really know how to put together explicit management implications single-handedly! 

Finally, in Castillo Vardaro’s research I saw a mirror of my own dissertation work. I had no pikas or fecal DNA, but we both finished our dissertation field work in National Parks before the 2016 election. Her work could inform whether pikas are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act; my research supported a climate change vulnerability assessment; and after our halcyon days as PhD students under the Obama administration, we are now watching an administration and Secretary of the Interior generally disregard the National Park Service expertise on these issues.

I told Castillo Vardaro that I feel an extra sense of urgency in publishing my Acadia papers now — especially in open access venues. I wondered if this was a personal quirk or if she felt a similar sense of responsibility for her field sites and study species. She agreed that highlighting the work that we are doing on public and federally managed lands is even more important in the current political climate. “One of the main reasons I chose to publish in PLOS ONE was because I wanted the manuscript to be accessible (open access).” She also noted that, “the PIP project was funded as part of the NPS Climate Change Response Program. I do worry about continued funding for similar projects and initiatives under Zinke and the Trump administration. Pikas tend to live in places that aren't as directly impacted by development as other ecosystems (it would be difficult to put a subdivision on the steep, rocky, side of a mountain), but the policies and proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act under the current administration to make it easier for development and resource extraction on public lands could definitely impact pikas.” 

The flipside of non-academic coauthors bridging a conservation gap is this: when the federal government is hostile towards non-extractive natural resource management, the academic coauthors in these partnerships will continue to publish our findings, piling up the evidence to support our field sites and our study species. For those of us in academia who completed National Park fieldwork in what seems like another era, getting the writing done can seem both daunting and futile. It's not. Traditionally, the first wedding anniversary is the “paper” anniversary, but for the National Park Service’s 102nd I think papers are still an appropriate — and important — gift. 

References:

Castillo Vardaro JA, Epps CW, Frable BW, Ray C (2018) Identification of a contact zone and hybridization for two subspecies of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) within a single protected area. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199032.

National Parks are for the Birds

Happy National Parks week!While I tend to plan trips around plants — Thuja plicata in Olympic National Park, Lathyrus japonicas at Cape Cod National Seashore — I understand the draw of non-botanical Park residents: the iconic bison in Yellowstone, the wolves and moose of Isle Royale, the bald eagles cruising the coast of Acadia. 

Birds are among the most beloved park wildlife, and people — regular visitors, rangers and researchers alike — have been studying birds in National Parks for decades. Bird watchers are among the most consistent and prolific citizen scientists and their observations from National Parks to backyards comprise some of the largest and oldest community-based science research in the country. The most famous datasets of this kind are the Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey. These two datasets — covering a huge spatial area, a long species list, and over three decades of observations — allowed the National Park Service and the National Audubon Society to project bird responses to climate change across the National Park System.

Imagine you are standing in a National Park (I always imagine I am standing in Acadia). Take a moment to identify the avifauna — aka the birds — in this park. Now, zoom into the future, sometimes between 2041 and 2070. What birds are in your National Park now? Has your species list changed? Grown? Shrunk? Park managers, researchers, and bird watchers would all love to know the results from this time traveling exercise. Now, thanks to Dr. Joanna Wu and colleagues, we have these projections available! In a recent PLoS ONE paper, Wu and coauthors use the Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey to model climate suitability for over 500 bird species. Then, they zoom into the future and look around at the projected climatic changes in 274 National Park. From this perspective in the future, they write a new species list for each park: which birds are disappearing, and which new colonizers are expected to move in. They find that most parks are likely to become more bird-y — potential colonizations will exceed extirpations, especially in the winter. 

The models of summer and winter distributions were trained on two big, old citizen science projects — the Breeding Bird Survey and the Christmas Bird Count. I asked Wu if it was coincidence that this research was grounded in community-based science, since both Audubon and the National Park Service depend on the general public for support. She writes, “these data sets were the only ones done with survey rigor at a large enough of a spatial scale to allow us to map out bird occupancy across the entire North America. It was certainly meaningful for Audubon as the compilers of the Christmas Bird Count data to rely on our community science products in a scientific study.” This shared enthusiasm between Audubon and the community of birders is reflected in the beautiful website that presents Wu's findings to the public: you can watch species turnover, click on specific parks, and look at national trends.And it’s not just that birds are charismatic fauna with huge fan bases that are obsessed with making lists (I’m looking at you, birdwatchers). Wu notes, “birds are important ecological indicators because they travel much larger distances on an annual basis (as a whole) than plants or mammals, and may thus be able to track climate better than other taxa.” So, when Wu and her colleagues project changes in bird communities at the National Parks, they are looking at the frontline of ecological changes under anthropogenic climate change.

“Though plants and mammals are shifting too, birds are indicators as they’re likely to respond first and more drastically. Of course this leads to a potential mismatch in resource availability as plants, insects, etc. respond at a different rate to climate change, leading to unforeseeable consequences.” 

Finally, I asked Wu what we can do if we live and/or work outside of a National Park. Unfortunately, Acadia is not actually home, and I wanted to know how my actual backyard fit into the bigger picture here. “Our research does show that birds are going to be on the move and the corridors between parks are important to support this change. State parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and even back yards are going to be increasingly important places for birds moving to new areas in light of climate change. One of the things we can do is planting native plants to provide resources for birds as they face unprecedented change to the climates and habitats they evolved in in the coming decades.” 

Enjoy National Park Week! Happy birding! 

Reference:

Wu JX, Wilsey CB, Taylor L, Schuurman GW (2018) Projected avifaunal responses to climate change across the U.S. National Park System. PLoS ONE 13(3): e0190557. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190557

An Epic Joshua Tree Roadtrip & the Reproductive Ecology of an Iconic Southwest Plant

Think of your most amazing four-state roadtrip. How much data did you collect between stops at Disney Land and the hotel pool? Did you stargaze in the Mojave Desert or were you too exhausted after a day of running transects through Joshua Tree National Park? Did you look at the famous Joshua trees with wonder and awe, or did you keep your head down and count individual flowers on these episodic bloomers then hastily move on to the next site to keep tallying reproductive metrics? Did you come home to your computer and upload slideshows of vacation snapshots or did you immediately begin writing up notes like:

Despite its prominence in plant communities of the Mojave Desert, surprisingly little has been published on its reproductive and structural ecology. The majority of research on Joshua tree has focused on its highly coevolved pollination relationship with the Yucca moth. Outside its pollination biology only a few studies have been published on its reproductive ecology.

Thanks to one amazing roadtrip — with a little help from Disney World and Denny’s — new research is shedding some light on patterns of flowering, fruit production, and stand structure of Joshua trees across the Mojave Desert. I did not realize how “hashtag blessed” my own phenology research was until I read Samuel St. Clair and Joshua Hoines’ new PLoS ONE paper on the reproductive ecology of Joshua trees.

My research is a steady annual routine: I study flowering in plant populations that consistently bloom every spring when I arrive in Maine to record them. St. Clair does not have this luxury with Joshua trees — he writes: “episodic blooms make it hard to anticipate a study of its reproduction.” Early in 2013, St. Clair saw Joshua trees blooming at his field sites and called around — the trees seemed to be blooming across their range, he “even heard reports of blooming in Las Vegas and Phoenix yards.” As it became clear that 2013 was a rare opportunity to study reproductive ecology for an unpredictable study organism, St. Clair jumped to take advantage.

“Obviously there was little time to spare. I mapped out a range wide survey of populations, put a travel map together and booked hotels. Took my two sons out of school (ages 10 and 9) for field help in early May and promised them a stop at the Adventure Dome in Las Vegas and a day at Disneyland. We jumped in our car and were off.” St. Clair, a professor at BYU, and Hoines, at the National Park Service, split the fieldwork and covered ten study sites across four states in May and June 2013.

At each site they collected data on the population characteristics (population density, tree height, trunk diameter) and reproduction (number of inflorescences and total fruits, percent of trees in bloom, fruit mass, seed number) of 120 Joshua trees. That’s 1200 trees — from 60 100-meter transects! — in under two months. St. Clair shared some memorable moments, “A grasshopper outbreak at Lytle Rach that had the boys in tears, Kids eat free at Denny’s at least 4 or 5 nights and Disney Land was awesome. The boys still talk about the trip fondly.” The opportunistic rush for reproductive data revealed interesting patterns across the climate gradient of the Joshua tree’s range. At warmer sites, the Joshua trees produced more flowers and seeds, but stand density was lower, while at cooler sites, there were more Joshua trees but fewer flowers and fruit per tree. So while warming temperatures may be good news for reproductive success, the establishment of new Joshua trees seems constrained by warmer temperatures. I asked St. Clair what these results meant for Joshua trees facing climate change. “I think the bigger limitations moving forward will probably be in the seedling establishment and recruitment phases of development.  The fruiting success suggests that the pollinator populations are intact which is good—we’ve see pollination failure due to a lack of yucca moth in populations of Banana Yucca in a recent paper we published.” 

The future of Joshua trees in Joshua Tree National Park is not just a concern for scientists. The official twitter account of the Park (@JoshuaTreeNPS) garned five minutes of fame last November when they began tweeting about the potential effects of climate change on the park’s biodiversity. Secretary of the Interior Zinke apparently reprimanded the Joshua Tree National Park superintendant for these social media science lessons.The idea that a national park should be dissuaded from sharing research on the natural and cultural resources — including, the namesake of that park — with visitors and general public is truly absurd.

I think this means that it is our responsibility to tweet out the results and implications of St Clair and Hoines’ new paper and continue the conversation that @JoshuaTreeNPS started. 

Reference:

St. Clair SB, Hoines J (2018) Reproductive ecology and stand structure of Joshua tree forests across climate gradients of the Mojave Desert. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0193248. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193248

Science Communication, Simple Words, and Story Telling at ESA 2016

A guest post from PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow, Caitlin McDonough, on research from the Ecological Society of America Scientific Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, August 7-11, 2016.

On Tuesday afternoon at the Ecological Society of America 2016 Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, amid the many Latin species names and varied sub-discipline jargon, it was possible to stumble upon a session of talks about blue flyers, spring pretty flowers, God’s creatures, and animals with six legs and no bone in their back. The audience fell in love with black back wood hitters, cheered for flying friends with six legs and four wings that like sweet things and help plants with sex and was touched by the sentiment that the land had memory made up of things in the dirtand much of the memory was lost. 

This was the Up Goer Five Ignite Session, where seven brave scientists took on the challenge made famous by xkcd comic author Randall Munroe and his Thing Explainer book and presented their research using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language, originating from Munroe’s eponymous example. In the ESA session, the phylogeny of grassland plants was reduced to grasses, grasssish, smells fresh, sun flowers, fixers, and roses and climate change was described as the whole earth surface is getting more and more hot. The presenters approached their talks with a high level of creativity and humor, and the audience responded with enthusiasm, empathy, and #UpGoESA tweets.

Rebecca Barak opened the session with a high-energy summary of grassland restoration research. Her talk featured the poetic land memory line and the hilariously simplified grass phylogeny, as well as the explanation that one piece of equipment used to study seeds was the special machine that doctors use to look inside of you.

Nick Haddad asked Can I light a fire to save those damn butter flies? With surprising dexterity he wove the story of Icarus and Daedalus into his research on fire adaptation and complex species interactions. Here, we noticed how difficult it is to mark temporal change and population dynamics of a butterfly species with only the 1,000 most common words: over five tens of years the numbers of these plants have gone down to zero. The stark phrasing that people may need to kill these animals to save them was very powerful in this pared down vocabulary.

Margaret Lowman may have smuggled in a few extra words, but her talk about working with priests in Ethiopia to save sacred forests (birds eye view of trees: in the center is a round house called a church) was a refreshing reminder that there are whole communities that ecologists traditionally neglect to engage with, and these have the potential to be fruitful partnerships.

David Inouye shared research from his field site (or where he spends his time playing while not teaching) and explained phenology models by asking the audience Can we guess when that will happen? His talk featured the memorably phrased description of his Colorado field site location as the place where people over 21 can buy grass to get high. Samuel Cowell regaled us with tales of the nesting behavior of blue flyers — their propensity for stealing some wood hitter homes, but also their territorial protection of other wood hitter homes, ultimately summarizing their complex interactions as blue flyers are bad and good to the wood hitters.

Jeff Atkins’s visuals — drawings commissioned from his and his colleagues’ children — strongly resonated with the audience. Pairing crayons and construction paper with the big green stuff and the small green stuff, in the mountains and the not so flat ground was a brilliant take on the simplified vocabulary.

Finally, Elizabeth Waring closed the session with her comparison of Old Green Things and New Green Things. The crowd loved her terms for nitrogen deposition (extra ground food to make green things for humans grow harder faster stronger) and greenhouse experiments (grown in a hot box, I changed how hot the grass got).

Science communication, language, and accessibility were at the center of the post-presentations discussion. Across all of the talks, the most memorable and successful Up Goer Five phrases didn’t just substitute simple words for scientific jargon, they were emotional and evocative compositions. Distilling one’s science into the 1,000 most common words was described as an opportunity to influence the connotation of common (but not top 1,000 words common) phrases with thoughtful word choice. The direct vocabulary has a sharp impact. As one audience member noted, this was not just an exercise in how good are you at using a thesaurus — the speakers found ways to be poetic, expressive, and clear.

Restricting word choice to the 1000 most common words highlights how few of our common words are ecological terms. In a way, this highlights the difficulty of science communication with the general public: our vocabularies do not always intersect. Meg Lowman wondered aloud if we could add 125 of “our words” back to the common vernacular. The loss of nature words from the Oxford Children’s Dictionary and our vocabulary in general has been noted. Is this a crusade for ecologists? What are the 125 words that we most miss? And what can we do to reintroduce these into words so that the next generation of Up Goer Five ecologists has the ability to say “trees”? 

Great story telling was not limited to the Up Goer Five session. At the Wednesday night Special Session “Engaging with the Wider World True Tales Told Live” four ecologists were given the whole range of the English language to speak to their experiences in diverse forms of engagement. During his tale Matthew Williamson confessed to fellow story-teller and ESA President Monica Turner that years ago, in a punk rock phase, he had joined her field team as kid with a Mohawk and a bad attitude. The narratives tracked births, deaths, career changes, and community building; they reflected on intersections of creativity, courage and advocacy. There were funny moments — Monica Turner admitted “I am not Stephen Colbert!” — and deeply poignant personal stories. In beautifully crafted prose, Annaliese Hettinger described the joy, isolation, and exhaustion she found in finishing her Ph.D. within a year of the birth of her son, while caring for her dying mother who, decades before, had defended her own Ph.D. when Annaliese was an infant. There was a real sense of craving in the audience as we watched these ecologists talking about science communication. We want more examples of successful science communication, and more opportunities to practice these skills ourselves. These opportunities are at ESA; among our ranks are excellent science communicators, our meetings feature multiple workshops focused on diverse engagement opportunities, and the Up Goer Five audience passionately embraced the idea of an annual Ignite Session. Hopefully this is an areas where we can continue to build and grow. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a PhD candidate in the Primack Lab in the Biology Department at Boston University. She spends her field seasons in Acadia National Park, Maine studying leaf out and flowering phenology and patterns of historical species loss across plant communities. Her field methods include three ridge transects that are conveniently located adjacent to beautiful running trails and carriage roads. Away from Acadia’s granite ridges, she’s interested in underutilized sources of historical ecology data including herbarium specimens, field notebooks, photographs, and old floras; the potential for citizen science in phenology research; and the intersection of science and policy.  (Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitlinInMaine)

Common Gardens For All Your Climate Change Needs

A guest post from PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellows, Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie & Daniel E. Winkler, on research from the Ecological Society of America Scientific Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, August 7-11, 2016. 

Experimental gardens are an old-school methodology. In perhaps the best known example in the 1930s and 1940s Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey transplanted Potentilla glandulosa across their range in the Sierras to explore the roles of environment and genetics played in determining growth form. Clausen, Keck, and Hiesey’s classic methodology of reciprocal transplanting has a contemporary application in climate change studies, whereby researchers relocate a plant (or seed) from its home and current climate to a transplant garden and new (and perhaps future) climate. Seven decades later, the Ecological Society of America’s 2016 Annual Meeting features experimental gardens that include species ranging from alpine forbs to douglas fir trees to a dune-loving annual—collected along latitudinal, elevation, and habitat gradients. 

Nicole Rafferty opened the Climate Change: Ranges & Phenology I session presenting her research on patterns of bumblebee visitation at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. As a part of this project, she installed a reciprocal transplant experiment with seeds from three elevations planted at 12 plots per elevation site. She wanted to test how alpine plant-pollinator relationships might change as plant communities experience new microclimates (for example, if a species is transplanted to a warmer site at a lower elevation). Unfortunately, the first year of this study coincided with a dry summer and low germination rates — as a result, in 2016 she switched to seedlings. In her 2015 seed study, the glacier lily seeds from mid-elevation had the lowest success in the transplants, suggesting that mid-elevation might be a barrier to plant migrations upslope for this species.  

Range shifts and phenological are also on the minds of researchers at the U.S. Forest Service. This time with an applied focus aimed at aiding land managers who will likely need to develop strategies to make Forest Service lands more resilient to climate change impacts. Sheel Bansal at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and colleagues carried out a large-scale common garden study aptly named the Douglas-fire Seed-Source Movement trial. Their experiment used seeds from 60 sources throughout the species range in Washington, Oregon, and California and grew trees from each of the sources in 9 climatically-divergent field sites and also used artificial freeze experiments to test the impacts of changing environmental queues on Douglas fir cold hardiness and associated genetic linkages. They found strong differences in cold hardiness, with minimum winter temperatures and fall frosts as major predictors of cold hardiness based on seed source. Their results have important implications for the ability of species to shift their ranges by tracking climate envelopes, and further extend to land management efforts to maintain healthy forests experiencing future climates.

In the Great Lakes region, Elizabeth LaRue from the Emery Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder used a common garden to explore dispersal traits in American sea rocket (Cakile edentula var. lacustris). She knew that dispersal traits like pericarp, or seed wall, thickness and wet mass varied across the Cakile edentula range, but it was unclear if the variability was caused by environmental or genetic differences. Collecting seeds from across the range, and growing them together in a common garden isolated the role of genetic differences and revealed lower dispersal traits at the range edges. This data was used to inform species distribution models with different scenarios for starting dispersal genetics for Cakile edentula under climate change.

Kennedy Rubert-Nason in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues looked at the role of vernal freezes in determining aspen phenology and growth. They planted 6 aspen genotypes into common gardens at varying temperatures and examined a number of biological responses.  The number of days it took aspen to break bud accelerated in trees that experienced freeze-damage. Freeze-damaged trees were also stunted in their second year of growth when they experienced a freeze event during their first year. Defense compounds were also dramatically impacted, potentially indicating the negative effects of freeze events and the associated ability of the trees to defend against herbivores during their most vulnerable life stage. Their study nicely highlights the importance of the timing of environmental queues in dictating species susceptibility to a changing climate. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a PhD candidate in the Primack Lab in the Biology Department at Boston University. She spends her field seasons in Acadia National Park, Maine studying leaf out and flowering phenology and patterns of historical species loss across plant communities. Her field methods include three ridge transects that are conveniently located adjacent to beautiful running trails and carriage roads. Away from Acadia’s granite ridges, she’s interested in underutilized sources of historical ecology data including herbarium specimens, field notebooks, photographs, and old floras; the potential for citizen science in phenology research; and the intersection of science and policy.  (Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitlinInMaine) 

Daniel Winkler is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine and a recent National Park Service Young Leader in Climate Change. Daniel is a plant ecophysiologist interested in invasive species, evolutionary ecology, and climate change impacts on native communities in “extreme” environments. His field sites include much of the desert southwest, alpine regions of Colorado, the subalpine forests of Baja California, and the tundra of northern Japan. All of Daniel’s research focuses on climate change impacts on native systems, with an emphasis on parks and protected areas. You can follow him on Twitter @DanielEWinkler, his research on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GeoMustard/, or find more information on his website at www.winklerde.com.