The year-long fellowship program provides skills development and sustained mentorship in science communication and leadership, and each Wilburforce Fellow will set a goal for individual or collective engagement on a specific conservation issue. Professor Bakker, for instance, plans to explore how to better link land managers with scientific research. He’s thinking particularly about how to share scientific findings with land managers, and how to encourage them to experimentally evaluate their actions and adapt their activities as appropriate. His research could also include other angles, such as how to enable land managers to communicate their research questions to the scientists who might be able to address them.
The 20 fellows will begin their initial training this April and then work throughout the year with a range of trainers, including a team from COMPASS that specializes in science communication, as well as a number of science and environmental journalists.
Clarence Smith, left, and Cody Sifford with their poster competition certificates.
Smith, of the Blackfoot Nation, placed first with his poster, “Measuring Economic Value of American Cultural Designs within the Wooden Gift Market.” Sifford, of the Navajo Nation, placed second with is poster, “Developing an Impact Assessment of Local Air Quality as a Result of Biomass Burns.”
AISES works to increase the representation of American Indians and Alaskan Natives in science, technology, engineering and math studies and careers. Held annually since 1978, its national conference is a major event that draws more than 1,600 students and professionals from across the country. That’s quite a stage to earn the top two awards in the graduate student poster competition!
Great work, Clarence and Cody, and way to represent CINTRAFOR and SEFS!
This past summer, Professor Aaron Wirsing of the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) helped initiate a pilot research program to study the biology of reef sharks on a tiny atoll in the South Pacific. Tetiaroa, located about 33 miles north of Tahiti in French Polynesia, is comprised of a ring of 12 coral islets—also known as motus—surrounding a shallow lagoon. Largely untouched by human development, the lagoon is home to several shark nurseries, or areas where shark pups spend the first part of their lives, making the atoll ecosystem an especially promising site to study shark behavior and development under natural and nearly pristine conditions.
“In most parts of the world, shark populations have been heavily impacted by people,” says Professor Wirsing, who got to spend 10 days on the atoll in August. “So what tantalized us about Tetiaroa is that it’s close to Tahiti and fairly easy to reach, yet at the same time it’s remote enough to have very little human contact.”
Located about 33 miles north of Tahiti, the atoll of Tetiaroa consists of a string of coral islets surrounding a shallow lagoon.
French Polynesia, after all, is a collective of more than 100 islands spread out across a vast water area about the size of Western Europe, though with a total land area only about as big as Rhode Island. Within this sprawling network of archipelagos, moreover, sharks play an important role in traditional and modern Polynesian culture, and the government has established a moratorium on shark fishing. The result is effectively the world’s largest shark sanctuary, about half the size of the United States, making Tetiaroa a paradise for the sharks that live there—not to mention for the researchers who get to study them in this stunning natural laboratory.
Quite a Site
The unique conditions of an atoll ecosystem require an enormous amount of time and very particular geologic circumstances to form. On Tetiaroa, that work started millions of years ago when volcanic upwelling created a land mass above sea level. Coral slowly formed around the edges of the island, and while the volcano eventually became inactive, the coral continued to grow, maintaining its structural shape even as the volcano gradually disappeared under the ocean. In time, all that survived of the original upwelling was a barrier reef surrounding a turquoise lagoon, which floats like a tropical wading pool in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
How Tetiaroa evolved as a base for research operations—and how Wirsing got hooked into this project—began far more recently with the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty in 1961, when actor Marlon Brando first visited and quickly fell in love with the atoll. He ended up buying it in 1967, in fact, and aimed to preserve the natural wonders and biodiversity of the ecosystem.
Brando envisioned Tetiaroa as an ideal location for a luxury eco-resort and a small scientific community to support research and conservation efforts on the island. Though Brando never got to see his dream come to life, his estate—The Marlon Brando Living Trust, which owns Tetiaroa—has recently implemented much of that vision working with two partners: Pacific Beachcomber, which just opened The Brando, a highly exclusive eco-resort (where accommodations start around $3,600 a night), and Tetiaroa Society, a nonprofit scientific and cultural organization that now operates a research facility on the atoll.
Most juvenile reef sharks in the lagoon, like this blacktip, are about 1.5 feet long, though adults can grow larger than 5 feet.
Last year, in anticipation of The Brando’s opening, David Seeley of Tetiaroa Society reached out to the College of the Environment and expressed interest in bringing more researchers out to Tetiaroa. A number of projects are already under way on the atoll, including the work of Oceanography professors Julian Sachs and Alex Gagnon, as well as recent Oceanography alumna Lauren Brandkamp, measuring the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs. Another big project Seeley targeted—to be funded through a donation from his parents, Jim and Marsha Seeley, of Medina, Wash.—involved studying the atoll’s large population of sharks, including lemon sharks (Negaprion brevirostris) and blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus).
Sharks tend to reproduce in remote areas that are hard to research, and many coastal areas that might have once served as nurseries have been degraded or destroyed. But Tetiaroa’s shallow lagoon—protected from the open ocean and only a couple feet deep in most places—provides a relatively safe habitat for juvenile reef sharks to learn and mature for roughly the first year of their lives before venturing out as adults. That sheltered basin, in short, can open a special window into the shark world. So when the College approached Wirsing about the possibility of setting up a shark research program on Tetiaroa, he jumped at the chance.
“Our work on Tetiaroa can help establish a vital baseline for how healthy reef shark nurseries function,” he says.
Diving Deeper
Wirsing’s first job was to assemble a team of international shark experts. Though much of his current focus is on terrestrial ecosystems, his doctoral research involved the effects of tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier) predation on dugongs (Dugong dugon) in Australia’s Shark Bay, so right away he brought in a long-time collaborator on that project, Professor Mike Heithaus from Florida International University (FIU). Heithaus, who hosted the National Geographic Crittercam television series from 2002 to 2003, runs the Marine Community & Behavioral Ecology Lab at FIU, and one of his postdocs, Jeremy Kiszka, has also joined the Tetiaroa crew. The other principal researcher is Dr. Johann Mourier from the Insular Research Center and Environment Observatory (CRIOBE), based in Moorea, French Polynesia.
Professor Wirsing in the lagoon, which is about 7 kilometers across and only a couple feet deep in most places.
Their next task was to establish whether Tetiaroa would in fact be a good base to set up a shark study, so Wirsing, Kiszka and Mourier spent 10 days on the atoll this past August. While they weren’t lucky enough to get a room at The Brando, the Tetiaroa Society Ecostation itself is an impressive installation, offering cozy lodging and lab space for scientists and students from around the world. (It also features a number of green innovations, including a Sea Water Air Conditioning system that pulls cold water from the deep ocean to provide low-energy cooling for all the buildings on the island, as well as a biofuel power station that runs on locally produced coconut oil.)
They initially set out to answer some very basic questions about the lagoon ecosystem, such as what kinds of sharks live there, how many there are, and why they’re using the lagoon. Since the lagoon is only seven kilometers across, the ecosystem is small and contained enough to map and study in its entirety—potentially to the point of counting every shark in there. Yet given the limited time of the pilot season, the team decided to focus on surveying and mapping two of the largest nurseries to get a sense of their physical structure.
Using a combination of aerial drone photography and underwater videography with stationary cameras, they were able to generate a wealth of spatial and population data. The drones allowed the researchers to run multiple transects over the water, providing a broad sweep and bird’s-eye view of the lagoon and its fish communities. The underwater cameras, meanwhile, captured a more localized and detailed look at the nursery environment (including the footage below of a curious blacktip reef shark jostling the camera!).
Jeremy Kiszka and Johann Mourier, at right, set up a drone to run transects across the lagoon.
This first field season was fairly limited, and the researchers are still working through the data they collected. Yet thanks to another donation from the Seeley family, they’ll be returning to Tetiaroa this summer for a second trip. Professor Heithaus, who couldn’t make the first visit, will be joining the team and helping expand the operation. “This time we hope to actually catch, measure and sample the tissue of sharks to get a sense of what they eat,” says Wirsing, and down the road they might also be able to equip juvenile sharks with tracking technology so they can study their behavior and movements after they leave the nurseries.
“These nurseries are critical to reproduction,” he says. “One of our ultimate goals is to use this ecosystem as a reference point to guide restoration of areas that might someday serve as shark nurseries again, so the conservation implications are huge.”
Last weekend, I woke up early and pored over newspapers and websites looking for a place to ski with my sons. I was extremely disappointed to see rain again forecasted for Snoqualmie Pass, with more rain predicted in the next two days, all the way up to 6,000 feet. A few ski areas were open, but those that were had limited runs available, or the conditions were icy and ragged and threatened to tear up your skis. Another time of year, such a soggy forecast would be welcome news. But it was a grim outlook for the first weekend in January.
As an avid alpine and Nordic skier, I am acutely aware of the poor early-season snow conditions that have plagued the Pacific Northwest since my family moved here in 2012. As a natural scientist, I am also keenly aware of the complexities of regional weather patterns, and I have to resist the temptation to ascribe all poor ski conditions to a warming climate. At the same time, climate change is predicted to bring warmer, wetter winters to the region, and the existing conditions at Snoqualmie Pass are bearing that out. I know some might chide me and argue that a shortened ski season is hardly cause for global panic. Yet the effects of our warmer winters will eventually ripple throughout the natural resources sector, threatening forest productivity, widespread insect outbreaks, stand-replacing fires, mudslides and all sorts of critical wildlife habitat, including salmon-spawning streams.
In our first-ever Climate Change Video Contest, we are asking high school and undergraduate students in the state of Washington: What does climate change mean to you?
I couldn’t sleep later that night, and I found myself thinking about personal responsibility and how we can inspire collective action. Scientists have long understood and attempted to communicate the risks of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning, and the links between our behavior and climate change are very real and well-documented. Yet after decades of trying to build awareness, we have largely failed to move the voting public or our elected leaders to take determined action. During the holidays, I even read several reports that the recent downturn in gasoline prices has spurred higher sales of larger, fuel-consumptive vehicles. This type of short-term thinking reflects the gulf between what we’re constantly warned about climate change, and how we actually react as citizens.
The most frustrating part for me is wondering why these warnings won’t stick, so maybe we need to rethink our approach. Maybe we need to change the message. Or maybe we just need to change who is delivering the message and give prominent voice to younger generations—the future leaders who will inherit and confront the greatest impacts of climate change.
With that goal in mind, this year we are trying a new approach to addressing the climate issue. Rather than asking our scientists to tell a story of modeled predictions of a warming climate, we are hosting a video contest that challenges high school and college students in the state of Washington with a simple prompt: What does climate change mean to you? In the space of three minutes or less, they can approach the issue through virtually any artistic style. How to make this climate message resonate on a personal and actionable level, after all, is all that matters at this point.
So I’m really looking forward to seeing how students frame this issue. I’m excited to see what inspiration and ideas we can draw from them in communicating—and solving—the enormous environmental challenges ahead of us.
I’ll keep eyeing the forecast and hoping for more snow, of course, but always in the much broader context of achieving a sustainable balance with a changing climate and world.
Happy trails,
Tom DeLuca School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
Manuwal’s daughter, Joy Burke, helping with bird surveys in 2008.
The scope of the research alone should grab your attention, as it spanned 40 years from 1968 to 2008, starting from his time as a graduate student at the University of Montana. Take a look at the author list, though, and you’ll see what really distinguished this particular publication for Manuwal: He was able to include his wife, daughter and son in the research, and all four are co-authors on the paper!
“When I decided to re-survey my old Montana study areas,” he says, “I realized this would be a unique opportunity for me to involve my whole family in the effort. It turned out to be one of my most rewarding professional experiences. My wife Naomi helped me with the study in 1968, 1980 and 2008. She has a forest ecology background, so she helped with the plant sampling. My daughter Joy has learned how to identify birds, and she came out in 2008 to help me conduct bird surveys. While doing a bird survey one morning, she happened to flush a mountain lion along a riparian area she was surveying. It was very close! My son John also came out to help mark my study sites for bird and vegetation surveys. It was in early April and it was very cold—about 13 degrees—with lots of snow in places. It was hard work, but enjoyable!”
Though soil has often been considered a reliable long-term carbon sink, new research suggests that the effects of human land-use choices—from urbanization to agricultural intensification and deforestation—are reducing how much carbon is actually stored in the ground, says Professor David Butman, lead author on a paper just published in Nature Geoscience, “Increased mobilization of aged carbon to rivers by human disturbance.”
Professor David Butman
Professor Butman is a new faculty member with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences (SEFS) who holds a joint appointment with Civil and Environmental Engineering. He began this research in 2011 as an offshoot of his doctoral work at Yale University involving 13 major river basins in the United States. Starting from a trend he discovered in that initial data, Butman and his co-authors expanded the scope with direct sampling of aquatic carbon at a number of field sites around the world, and also combed the literature for other relevant studies, tracking down researchers whenever possible to verify data. The resulting study range covers 84 degrees of latitude from the Arctic to tropical ecosystems, providing a comprehensive, global data set of radiocarbon ages of riverine dissolved organic carbon, coupled with spatial data on land cover, population and environmental variables.
From exploring this data, Butman and his co-authors were able to determine how carbon isotopes of organic matter in rivers can show the impact of land cover disturbances—specifically, the release of ‘old’ carbon into the modern carbon cycle, analogous to the burning of fossil fuels. Most dissolved organic carbon in rivers originates from young organic carbon from soils and vegetation, but the results of this study suggest that 3.2 to 8.9 percent of that dissolved organic carbon is actually aged carbon that human disturbances have churned back into the system.
What that means, says Butman, is that the release of carbon through land use and land cover change has been undercounted in previous estimates of anthropogenic carbon emissions. The full impact of this increase on the global carbon cycle is not entirely clear yet, but it definitely means we’re reducing how much carbon is being stored in the land purely through how we manipulate and change the physical surface of the planet.
For the 125th anniversary of Washington’s statehood, the UW Botanic Gardens has donated the seeds of five rare plant species—all native to Washington—from the Miller Seed Vault to be buried in the Washington Centennial Time Capsule.
The time capsule is located in the Washington State Capitol in Olympia. It’s a large green safe with 16 individual capsules, one of which will be filled every 25 years until the state’s 500th birthday in 2389. The 2014 capsule will be loaded this January and then resealed during a ceremony on February 22, 2015, George Washington’s birthday.
Thompson’s clover, a unique clover found in the central part of Washington, is easy to spot in May among the perennial bunchgrasses and sagebrush.
Back in November, the Keepers of the Capsule, a volunteer group that helps steward the capsule project, had reached out to the UW Botanic Gardens to inquire about a possible donation of native seeds. Professor Sarah Reichard and Wendy Gibble, who manages the Washington Rare Plant Care and Conservation program, decided that an appropriate contribution would include bundles of seeds that represent plants from different habitats across the state. They were careful to select seeds that are rare and endemic to Washington, but that are not in short supply in the Miller Seed Vault (just in case the seeds don’t last 375 years in an airtight aluminum foil package!).
The five selections include Thompson’s clover (Trifolium thompsonii) from the shrub-steppe of central Washington; Barrett’s beardtongue (Penstemon barrettiae) from the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge (pictured below); Washington Polemonium (Polemonium pectinatum) from the channel scablands of eastern Washington; Victoria’s paintbrush (Castilleja victoriae) from a tiny island in the San Juans; and Whited’s milk-vetch (Astragalus sinuatus) from a 10-square-mile region south of Wenatchee, Wash.
Each bundle includes 20 seeds and comes with specific instructions about propagation, as well as general information about the plant’s characteristics and where the seeds were collected. Will these seeds be alive and well in 2389? Hard to say, says Gibble, but it’s a shame we won’t be there to see for ourselves!
A few weeks ago, we reported about a new publication in Environmental Science and Technology that involves several authors in Professor Sharon Doty’s Plant Microbiology Lab. In the paper, “Degradation, Phytoprotection and Phytoremediation of Phenanthrene by Endophyte Pseudomonas putida, PD1,” Research Scientist Zareen Khan and her co-authors—David Roman, Trent Kintz, May delas Alas, Raymond Yap and Professor Doty—demonstrate the ability of willow trees and grasses, inoculated with a specific bacteria, to remove a serious pollutant from the environment.
It’s exciting research, and one of the most impressive angles is that four of the paper’s authors were undergraduates in Doty’s lab while contributing to the project.
Research Scientist Zareen Khan, lead author on the recent publication, joined the Doty lab in 2010.
One of those students, David Roman, graduated in 2012 and is now working at an analytical testing laboratory in Seattle. When he first came to SEFS six years ago, he was an older student and says he was eager to get involved in research as quickly as possible. Yet since he was transferring from North Seattle College, he was one of the last to pick courses during his first quarter. That delay ended up being a fortuitous break, though, as he found a late spot in one of Professor Doty’s classes, where he learned about phytoremediation—the use of plants to clean up pollutants from soil and water.
The success of phytoremediation depends on a number of factors, from the type of plant being used to the level of toxicity in the soil, which can stunt or kill a host plant before it can be effective. But one emerging strategy to enhance and accelerate the process—the subject of the paper, and a major focus of the Doty lab—involves inoculating the plants with naturally occurring microbes (endophytes) that live inside plants to create a powerful and mutually beneficial relationship.
Like microorganisms that live within humans, microbes within plants are important for plant health, providing nutrients and increasing stress tolerance, and in some cases detoxifying pollutants the plants take up. Endophytes are a subset of this microbiota that live fully within plants; they do not cause disease, but rather act as symbiotic partners. These microbes have fast generation times and can rapidly evolve abilities to detoxify or metabolize chemicals. Trees like willows and poplars have much slower generation times, but they can use partnerships with these bacteria to help them survive in harsh environments. Specifically, endophyte-assisted phytoremediation couples the better pollutant degradation abilities of microbes with the plant’s ability—via extensive root systems and uptake of air pollutants through leaves—to absorb pollutants from a wide area.
The result is a completely natural environmental scrub, and the concept immediately hooked Roman. “So many people in the environmental science fields are trying to find some way to stave off the carbon wave that is coming—that is already here,” he says. “The thing about phytoremediation is that we’re cleaning up the messes we’ve already made and taking back land we’ve lost.”
Roman was especially drawn to the power of these microbes to help reclaim polluted landscapes. “We don’t need to point a finger at anybody,” he says. “The trees don’t care who was here beforehand; they’re just here to help.”
Halfway through his first quarter, Roman approached Doty to see she if needed any extra help in the lab. By the next quarter, she was able to bring him in to assist with a number of projects, and within a month she’d hired him as a lab assistant. Soon he was fully immersed in phytoremediation, spending about 30 hours a week on independent research (ESRM 499), while also going to school full-time and working another 30 hours a week in the Doty lab.
Roman couldn’t get enough of the research, and he especially loved the simplicity and sustainability of using poplars and willows as natural cleaning agents. “The way you plant them,” he says, “is to cut a branch off an existing tree, stick it in the ground, and in a couple months you have an actively working, phytoremediating tree. You’re talking about a very sustainable and functional natural process that doesn’t take a lot of machinery or extra fuel—and it works.”
The subject alone was enough to motivate Roman. But a big part of what makes working in the Doty lab so special, he says, is that undergraduates are given all the tools and freedom to thrive as researchers, from hands-on guidance to collaborative opportunities with fellow students. “Sharon and Zareen really mentored me and were always open for discussions and ideas. You felt supported, and that confidence in your work and really pushes you to do as much as you can.”
By the end of his time with SEFS, in fact, Roman had produced a 26-page research paper of all the experiments he had completed in two-plus years of work—and, of course, gotten his name on his first scientific publication.
“It took me six years to graduate,” he says, “which was wonderful in every way but the bill I got afterwards from Sallie Mae. Yet I wouldn’t have traded my time in the Doty lab for anything.”
Local Applications
Another exciting dimension of phytoremediation is the potential for using the technology right here in Seattle (not to mention its applicability to other polluted and brownfield sites around the world). Managed by Seattle Parks and Recreation, Gas Works Park was originally home to a coal gasification plant that operated from 1906 to 1956. The soil and groundwater at the site remain contaminated by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), including phenanthrene, which the Environmental Protection Agency has listed as a “priority pollutant” because of its carcinogenicity and toxicity.
Seattle’s Gas Works Park, where a coal gasification plant operated for 50 years until 1956.
Carcinogenic pollutants like phenanthrene are widespread in our environment, but effective technologies to remove them are limited. Common mitigation solutions involve excavation and indefinite storage of the contaminated soil, or capping a site to cover up contaminated areas; both approaches can be expensive, and the latter often involves repeated rounds. Gas Works Park, for instance, was initially capped with 1.5 feet of clean soil, which provides a buffer and removes the threat to park visitors. But occasionally the pollutants seep up near the surface, and the park has to be closed for recapping—which is happening right now—to make it safe again.
That’s what makes Gas Works Park such an ideal test ground. Doty’s lab has isolated a natural microbial endophyte that is able to tolerate and break down phenanthrene while also preserving the host plant. So if willow shrubs are colonized with this bacterium and planted at the park—either all at once, or in sections for several-year intervals—they should be able to solve the park’s contamination problem naturally, permanently and far more cheaply than capping.
Willows are particularly well-suited for the job since they are native to Washington, highly adaptable and can grow five to six feet a year, with rapidly spreading root systems to maximize their reach in absorbing pollutants. Plus, after several years of work, they could be removed and the park restored to its former condition—minus much of the contamination. Yet even if people are adamantly opposed to planting willows, says Doty, they could still inoculate the grass with the same endophytes. The grass might not be as effective as the willows, but it would still begin removing some of the soil contaminants.
Before implementing any of these strategies, though, several big questions would need to be resolved, starting with figuring out what the public and other stakeholders would think about having phytoremediation introduced at Gas Works Park.
“The most exciting part for me, by far, is the ability of plant-microbe interactions to accomplish all these different things,” says Weir.
That’s a question one of Professor Doty’s doctoral students, Ellen Weir, is hoping to answer with her research into the social acceptability of phytoremediation. She’s currently collecting direct public input and determining whether the community would be okay with allowing phytoremediation at Gas Works Park—and, if so, under what conditions.
“If we had the same piece of land outside the city, it would be way easier to implement phytoremediation,” she says. But with an iconic park in the heart of Seattle, accounting for the social environment makes the task immensely more nuanced and delicate.
Weir set out several months ago by contacting community groups and putting out bulletins to organize focus groups of four to eight people. She sat down with these groups and had conversations about what phytoremediation is and how it might be implemented at Gas Works. She recorded their thoughts and concerns and used that feedback to develop surveys for a broader subset of the population. She then distributed those surveys by handing them out to park visitors at different times, as she wanted to make sure she was hearing responses from actual users.
So far, she’s heard back from about 140 responders, and Weir says that despite seeing some trepidation about implementing an unfamiliar solution, the reactions overall have been positive and do not preclude the use of phytoremediation. Some of the biggest concerns include whether phytoremediation is a contamination risk to park users, or whether the technology involves the use of any genetic modification (no and no, incidentally). Another worry is that the willows will obstruct the view and traditional experience of the park. More than anything, though, she has learned how invested people are in the long-term health and use of the park, and how much they want to be involved in important decisions regarding its future. “That’s why it’s so critical to take into account the views and perspectives of all stakeholders,” she says.
As she continues to collect the final surveys and analyze her data, Weir hopes to have more concrete results in the next couple months—and when she’s done, she will have filled a major hole in the decision-making process. When she started her research, after all, no one knew what the public thought about phytoremediation as an alternative to capping at Gas Works Park. Now, when Weir’s research is complete, managers will have more information to guide future management decisions at the park, and that could open the door for some magical microbes to do their work.
Aaron Johnston, who earned his Ph.D. from SEFS in spring 2013, was recently awarded a prestigious, two-year postdoctoral research position with the U.S Geological Survey’s Mendenhall Research Fellowship Program! Johnston studied competition between eastern and western gray squirrels in the Puget Sound lowlands for his dissertation (working with Professor Emeritus Steve West), and he will be moving to Bozeman, Mont., after the winter holidays to begin the fellowship.
Aaron Johnston’s fellowship will include two field seasons, and he’ll be expected to produce several publications from the research.
Selected through a competitive proposal process, Mendenhall Fellows help USGS staff conduct concentrated research around a number of important areas. Johnston’s proposal, “Extinction dynamics and microrefugia of the American pika,” will pair him with Dr. Erik Beever in Bozeman to explore the effects of climate change on pikas in the Cascades and Northern Rockies, though he hasn’t finalized his study area yet. He’ll have a research budget and be able to bring on a couple assistants to help with the project.
American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are a smaller relative of rabbits and hares. They’re an herbivorous alpine species that spread south with the last ice age, and now they’re holding on in high-altitude mountain areas in western North America. Their dependence on colder temperatures and preferred habitat—talus fields and rock piles at or above the tree line—has generally restricted their range to “sky islands” at the tops of mountains, where movement from one region to another can’t happen quickly, if at all. As a result, a warming climate threatens to shrink or eliminate the habitable range of pikas in the coming decades, and some estimates already suggest that 40 percent of American pikas in the Great Basin have disappeared in the last century, with the remaining populations retreating to even higher elevations.
With their habitat shrinking as the climate warms, American pikas are retreating to higher elevations on the “sky islands” of mountaintops.
Johnston says there are competing hypotheses about why this large-scale extinction is occurring. One widely supported theory revolves around the fact that pikas can’t survive prolonged exposure to high temperatures (more than a couple hours above 80 degrees, in fact, can kill them). Yet in a few regions, where temperatures far exceed that maximum—such as Craters of the Moon and Lava Beds national monuments—some pika populations have found a way to survive using microrefugia to escape the heat. Other hypotheses focus on phenology, and whether changing temperatures will reduce available vegetation for pikas, or if warmer winters will reduce available snowpack for insulation and expose pikas to extreme cold.
To address these questions and help design effective conservation strategies, Johnston’s project will involve modeling and mapping pika habitat topography using LiDAR. He’s been working in Professor Monika Moskal’s Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Lab, and he sees powerful applications of LiDAR for wildlife management. “I think it’s a really exciting new technology that has enormous potential we’re just starting to realize,” says Johnston.
Project Summary The objectives of this study are to:
1. Develop broad-scale maps of talus at high-resolution through fusion of LiDAR and multispectral imagery;
2. Develop predictor variables for untested hypotheses about substrate, snowpack and phenology;
3. Evaluate regional variation in extinction mechanisms by incorporating new data on extirpations outside of the Great Basin; and
4. Evaluate differences in habitat and connectivity maps created by models with and without microclimate and microhabitat variables.
This project will use limited field work to characterize substrate at selected sites for development of talus maps, and supplement existing data on pika persistence at historical sites of occurrence. Results of this study will increase understanding of pika responses to climate change, inform conservation strategies, and provide map products widely applicable to many research areas, including wildlife ecology, plant ecology, geomorphology, hazard assessment and hydrology.
***
Congratulations, Aaron, and good luck with this tremendous opportunity!
Unlike our two other new faculty members, Professor Peter Kahn joins us from just up the road on campus in Guthrie Hall, where he continues to hold a joint appointment with the Department of Psychology—and where he is director of the Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Lab. Yet there is nothing short or linear about the path he followed to become a professor, and how his research has aligned with SEFS.
Professor Kahn had what he calls a rather unusual childhood and professional trajectory, and he can trace many of his current research interests to his teenage years. At age 13, while living in the San Francisco Bay Area, he decided to drop out of his school to pursue carpentry for several years. Then, from ages 16 to 20, he ventured to a 670-acre community-run cattle ranch five hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Kahn lived communally on the ranch and guided people into the wilderness on horse trips. Sometimes he’d ride for a week at a time, unencumbered by property boundaries and fence lines. “I came of age with a lot of space, and that’s very deep within me,” he says.
At age 20, Kahn headed to Bozeman, Mont., to attend farrier school and become a specialist in equine hoof care, and then he used that trade to work his way through Santa Rosa Junior College in California. A few years later, he transferred to U.C. Berkeley and—having discovered a special fondness for Milton and Shakespeare—graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s in English.
He continued on to graduate school at U. C. Berkeley, as well, and shifted his studies to social and moral development for his master’s in 1984, and then earned his Ph.D. in 1988.
Since then, as his research interests have branched in a number of directions, Kahn says his experience on that communal ranch—which he remains a part of—continues to shape some of his intellectual activity. “In our community,” says Kahn, “the younger generation has shifted perspectives of what we think is big space and adequate space for healthy living. We adapt to more congested and degraded environments, but just because we adapt doesn’t mean we do well.”
Part of what drew Kahn to affiliate more closely with SEFS was an interest in exploring why conservation is not just important for ecosystems, but also for human beings.
Part of what drew him to affiliate more closely with SEFS was an interest in further exploring our connection to the outdoors, and how you can’t interact with something, like nature and open space, that isn’t there anymore—in other words, why conservation is not just important for ecosystems, but for human beings. Some of his research themes include environmental generational amnesia, and shifting baselines about what counts as an optimal environment; the loss of language to express the richness of our experiences in nature; and what he calls interaction pattern design, and how we can construct a building or urban space that doesn’t just incorporate visual or structural elements of nature, but actually facilitates closer interaction and engagement with it.
His recent books (with MIT Press) highlight some of his related interests: Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (2011); The Rediscovery of the Wild (2012); and Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species (2013).
For now, you can reach him by email or at his office in Guthrie 308, and he will have an office in Anderson by the beginning of next quarter. He’s looking forward to collaborating with SEFS faculty, so start dreaming up research partnerships and welcome Professor Kahn to the SEFS community!
The year-long fellowship program provides skills development and sustained mentorship in science communication and leadership, and each Wilburforce Fellow will set a goal for individual or collective engagement on a specific conservation issue. Professor Bakker, for instance, plans to explore how to better link land managers with scientific research. He’s thinking particularly about how to share scientific findings with land managers, and how to encourage them to experimentally evaluate their actions and adapt their activities as appropriate. His research could also include other angles, such as how to enable land managers to communicate their research questions to the scientists who might be able to address them.
