National Parks

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