LTER – Field Talk

Changing climate, changing landscape: monitoring the vast wilderness of interior Alaska

liza — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:17:43 +0000

Reds and golds of Fall. Broadleaf shrubs flame around the ever-green of conifers in the Toklat basin ecoregion of Denali National Park. Credit, Tim Rains, Denali National Park and Preserve, 2011.

National Park Service plant ecologist Carl Roland lives in Alaska, where climate change is palpably present. Ecologists have predicted major landscape-scale changes in the future of the Alaskan interior, with a potential shift from the iconic black and white spruce boreal forest, to broadleaf trees, or even grasslands, through a combination of heat, drought, insect outbreaks, and more frequent wildfires.

But predicting the future is not simple, not when you’re talking about landscapes as large and varied as the Alaskan Interior.

Carl and his colleagues in the Alaska National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring program have established ongoing ecosystem assessment across the Central Alaska Network encompassing Denali, Wrangell-Saint Elias, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Parks and Preserves.

They have just published the first chunk of data in the February issue ESA’s journal Ecological Monographs, reporting a decade of data from Denali on the distribution and abundance of southcentral Alaska’s six tree species. They established over 1000 permanent sample sites spread across 1.28 million hectares of the north side of the park, hiking into remote locations, scrambling rocky slopes and wading mountain ponds to reach randomized plots. Carl tells Liza Lester why he thinks white spruce may expand higher up mountain slopes and into thawing tundra, while the cold-loving black spruce might lose ground. He describes his efforts to make National Park Service data more accessible, and makes a plea for the complementarity of academic and government science.

Click over to ESA’s blog, EcoTone, for more photos and experimental detail. Read more about the science of Denali’s changing landscape on the NPS Alaska Regional Office website.

Landscape-scale patterns in tree occupancy and abundance in subarctic Alaska. (2013) Carl Albert Roland, Joshua H. Schmidt, and E. Fleur Nicklen. Ecological Monographs 83(1):19-48.

Tallgrass prairie: the invasion of the woody shrubs

liza — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:04:08 +0000

Kansas native Jesse Nippert loves the prairie. He spends much of his time immersed in the tall grass as an assistant professor at Kansas State University. Though agriculture has vastly changed the plains of North America, pockets of tall grass remain on rangeland and preserves. But the remaining tallgrass prairie, like grasslands all over the world, is changing as well, becoming, in many places, scrubland. The change is a problem for ranchers and an absorbing mystery for grassland ecologists. Jesse explains indications of positive feedbacks promoting the creeping spread of woody shrubs into the tallgrass prairie, from his paper in the November edition of Ecosphere, ESA’s new online-only, open-access journal.

Learn more about tallgrass prairie, C4 grasses, and the Konza Long Term Ecological Research site in the accompanying post on ESA’s blog, Ecotone.

Stepping stones of diversity: the Santa Barbara landscape and giant kelp genetics

liza — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:06:00 +0000

What is it about the rocky habitat in California that makes giant kelp so prevalent? And how do they spread from one section of the Santa Barbara Channel to another? According to Filipe Alberto, a marine population geneticist at the Centre for Marine Sciences in Portugal, giant kelp spread from one area to another in a stepping stone fashion, changing their genetic make-up as they go along. In his study, published in the January issue of Ecology, Filipe and colleagues analyzed the effects of isolation on genetic diversity between kelp forests. Diving with researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Filipe collected all the samples he needed to study their genetic diversity—and he did it in just two weeks at the coastal Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Conception, California. The samples, which were then shipped back to Portugal, showed that habitat continuity plays an important role in genetic connectivity.