Thanks, everybody, for being here.
I was worried with Tony Yamato, the rockstar,
giving a talk across the hall
I was gonna get nobody, so maybe that room's full.
So thank you for coming.
(audience laughs and chatters)
So I'll start just by thanking all this list of co-authors
and organizations that supported this work,
and especially Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park,
which is the organization that I'm from.
And so I'll get started by introducing you
to my favorite plant.
This plant's called Three-toothed Cinquefoil,
and it's my favorite plant
because it's a really good example of the types
of management challenges that practitioners
and managers are facing all around the world.
And so at Acadia National Park, we're actively trying
to restore this plant
and other plants on the summit of Cadillac Mountain
and other mountains in the park.
And it's doing really well in those restorations now.
In fact, it's the plant that's probably doing the best
in those restorations now, but it has a really bleak future.
So models predict that it could lose 98%
of its distribution in Maine by the end
of the century due primarily
to increased maximum summer temperatures.
And so we're left trying to figure out at Acadia,
how can we ensure that the money
that we're investing in this restoration of this plant today
will continue to provide benefits in the future
as climates change
and locations become unsuitable for this species.
And as I said, that's a challenge that practitioners
and natural resource managers are facing
all around the world.
And practitioners aren't without options.
That's the good thing, right?
There's dozens of options that have been proposed out there
and all the different literature.
And in fact, a review that was published in 2019 suggests
that there's 23 different categories,
so not 23 different options,
but 23 different categories of climate adaptation options
that have been proposed out there in the literature.
But the problem is, almost none of those have been tested.
And so that same review by Susan Prober showed
that 84% of those strategies
that have been proposed in the literature have no empirical
or on-the-ground support to, you know,
support their use in the field.
And a review that came out just I think like last month,
that, you know, supports that idea.
And so, you know, this isn't something
that was just back in 2019.
It's still here now.
Most climate change adaptation strategies
haven't been tested.
And so I'll give you a few take homes from this talk.
This is the first one.
We need more on-the-ground tests
of our climate change adaptation strategies,
because many of these things
that are being proposed out there
in the literature, they're novel,
and so we don't necessarily know if they'll have
the intended impact on ecosystems.
So we need more tests of these adaptation strategies.
But testing climate change adaptation strategies comes
with a trade-off, right?
On the one hand, if we wanna stop the worst impacts
of climate change, then we need
to be getting these things on the ground yesterday,
if not now, right?
But on the other hand, if we wanna test these things,
those tests take time, right?
Ecology is slow.
Things happen slowly.
And so these things could take decades.
And so, how do we overcome this trade-off
between the urgency to adapt
and the time it it takes to learn?
Well, a lot of people that are familiar
with adaptive management will think that's how we do this.
We do this with adaptive management,
and in the context of climate change,
you know, this is how we often think of adaptive management.
We implement a single strategy,
we monitor that strategy over time,
and then we evaluate if that strategy worked or not.
If it doesn't work, then we just go back
to the drawing board.
And although this is useful in some circumstances,
I'd suggest that it's often too slow, right?
And so, as I said, you know, implementing a strategy,
we could be decades before we get here
to find out if that works.
And then if it doesn't work,
we're back to the drawing board, right?
And then the other problem with this approach, right,
is that we're not comparing this strategy
to any other strategy.
So we don't know if this is the best strategy
that we implemented here.
We don't even know if this is better
than what we were doing before, right?
We just know where it works or doesn't work at the end.
And so because of this, we think we need kind
of a better way to be testing
our climate adaptation strategies.
So what we're proposing is that rather than just implement
a single strategy at this first phase,
we should be implementing
multiple strategies simultaneously.
And we think that this will help us compare strategies
including, you know, non-climate-adapted controls.
And hopefully at the end of this process,
we're in a much better spot from learning, right?
We might know a better direction to go in the future.
And then the key thing I wanna point out is that,
you know, we shouldn't just do this willy-nilly, right?
We should use a rigorous experimental design to do this.
So when possible, it's not always possible,
but when possible, we should use replication,
randomization, and controls.
And so, the second take home message from this talk
is that I think if we can, you know, we can't always,
but if we can implement multiple adaptation strategies
simultaneously, that should significantly increase our rate
of learning about which of these strategies work
and where do they work.
And so I'll give you a few examples of how we're doing this
at Acadia National Park, mostly to show you that,
you know, this is possible to do.
And so I already introduced you
to my favorite plant, Three-toothed Cinquefoil.
I told you it's doing really well in our restorations today,
and it has this really bleak future.
And so we're trying to figure out, you know,
how do we adapt to climate change?
And there's really two strategies
that are commonly proposed in the literature
for adapting populations to climate change.
One is to increase genetic diversity,
and we can do that by collecting individuals
from different locations, planting those individuals
of cinquefoil at our restoration site.
And then a more specific case of this is, you know,
adding pre-adapted genotypes, or assisted gene flow,
where we collect individuals specifically
from warmer locations and we plant those
at our restoration sites.
And so these strategies are being implemented
around the world already,
but like most adaptation strategies, there's not a lot
of evidence out there to support that they work effectively.
And so in 2021, I set out to kind of test this,
both of these strategies, increasing diversity
and adding pre-adapted individuals.
We collected cinquefoil individuals from 31 locations
throughout New England, ranging from down here near Boston
to up here in Central Maine,
and we brought all those plants to Acadia National Park,
and we planted them in an experimental restoration site.
So this site looks identical
to our other restoration sites on the summit.
The only difference is we've partitioned it
into these 15 different units,
and then we randomly assigned a treatment
to each one of those units.
And so we have a management treatment
that's kind of a non-climate-adapted control
where we plant just local genotypes.
That's what we do in our restorations now.
So that's comparing what we do now.
And we have these treatments
where we increase genetic diversity
and we have treatments where we added
warm adapted genotypes, and then we've got replicates
of each one of those treatments,
and those are independent replicates
using different source collections.
So we've got this replication randomization and control.
And there's two things I really wanna point out
about this experiment.
And the first is that, you know,
this is not a big experiment.
You know, it's the size
of this space right here in this room.
And I present this for that reason, right?
We don't have to do a multimillion-dollar huge experiment
to test these things.
We can do it on a small scale,
especially with this types of treatments.
And then I'll just note that this is actually part
of a much bigger study
where we have common gardens across an elevational gradient
so we can understand how these treatments
respond in different temperatures.
So that increases our ability to learn.
And so there's the second example I wanna talk about
is happening in two of the biggest wetlands
in Acadia National Park,
which are Great Meadow and Bass Harbor Marsh.
And both of these sites are plagued by the same problem,
which is this invasive shrub, glossy buckthorn.
So the National Park Service spends a lot
of time every year trying
to remove glossy buckthorn from sites,
but unfortunately, it commonly reinvades sites
after just a couple of years.
So for example, this is a picture of a site that was managed
two years prior to when I took this picture,
and almost every single green leaf in this picture
is a glossy buckthorn seedling.
So it comes back and it comes back with a vengeance.
And the park keeps up with this problem now by going
to these sites every three to five years
and does management at the sites.
But we're worried that climate change
is gonna make this problem kind of unable to be managed.
And there's a few reasons for that.
There's a couple reasons why
wetlands could be getting a little drier,
which could favor glossy buckthorn in some spots.
And then also we're worried that glossy buckthorn
might be better able to take advantage
of this longer growing season
that we're already seeing at the park.
And so to try to figure out
how we can better do this management
and hopefully be able
to keep a handle on glossy buckthorn under climate change,
we worked with the park to develop two different strategies
in combination with their kind
of removal only practice like they do now.
So this is what they do now.
This is a control.
We also are now removing glossy buckthorn
and then also planting graminoids.
And the hope here is that those graminoids grow
really quickly and then spread out over the site
and out-compete glossy buckthorn seedlings.
And then we're also removing glossy buckthorn
and planting shrubs.
And although those shrubs grow as quickly,
hopefully they'll shade out glossy buckthorn
after a while in some of these sites.
And so we took these three treatments
and we set up 15 different plots
and both of these two marshes in Acadia National Park,
and the plots look something like this.
And so we first set up a deer fence.
As we heard this morning, deer are a problem
and they'll eat our native plants.
And so we set up these deer fences,
we then removed all the glossy buckthorn
within the fence, and then we set up these four subplots
within the plot.
And they just represent our treatments.
So we have the typical control, the removal only plot,
we planted shrubs, we planted grasses,
and then we've got this plot
where our technicians love this.
You dig a hole like you're gonna plant a shrub
and you fill in the hole and don't actually plant a shrub.
(audience laughing)
And the reason for that is we're worried
that the soil disturbance
that you get from doing these native plantings
could actually make the glossy buckthorn problem worse.
And so we're testing that as well.
And so this is a good example
of kind of how we can do this on a regional scale.
You know, this is across the park in two different wetlands
and we get a little bit more robust difference then
about which strategies are working and which ones aren't.
And so hopefully these two examples give you an idea
that this is possible.
We can do this both at local, regional,
and even bigger scales,
and it should hopefully result in rapid learning.
But there's other benefits to taking this approach.
And this is the third take home message I want
from this talk is that there's secondary benefits
to taking this kind of experimental approach to management.
And one of those is resilience
through the portfolio effect.
So let's say we just did what we would normally do,
we just pick one approach,
we implemented that on the landscape,
and then we get a really heavy rain event
like we're getting a lot now at Acadia National Park
and the wetland floods and all those shrubs die.
Then our entire restoration has failed at that site.
But if we implement two strategies
and we also plant graminoids, which are more resilient
to flooding, and we get a big flood, then at least only half
of our restorations fail, right?
So we're hedging our bets against the uncertainties
of climate by kind of doing multiple things.
And so that's one of the advantages.
The second advantage I wanna point out
is that I really think these experiments,
especially in a beautiful place like Acadia National Park,
are great science and management communication tools.
So for example, I had the opportunity a few years back
to take a US Congressional delegation
around Acadia, talk about climate change,
talk about climate change adaptation, and you know, we went
to all the most beautiful places in the park,
but US Representative Mike Quigley decided to tweet
to his 52,000 constituents
about our experimental restoration plot
on the summit of Cadillac Mountain, right?
And talking about the mission now as adaptation
and resilience, not just restoration, right?
That's a huge reach that I wouldn't get on my own.
And I think there's just something about having these plots
in beautiful natural places
that's really compelling to people.
So they make these
great science management communication tools.
But you know, I wanna close by kind of acknowledging, right,
that we're not the first people to suggest
we should be doing experimental management, right?
People have been talking about this for years,
and of course it's not really happening on the landscape
as much as we would like to see.
And so we probably need some systemic changes if we want
to see this happen more widely.
And so I think the good thing is a lot
of these changes are already happening.
So the first change I wanna suggest
is that we need more models of effective coproduction
where scientists and managers work together every step
of the way, right, to design these experiments.
And Schoodic Institute where I work is a perfect example of,
you know, we're an institute whose mission is to work
with, be a science partner to the National Park Service.
So we need more of this kind of work to ensure
that we're using rigorous science
to address relevant management challenges.
We of course need different funding models, right?
And so not always,
but often managers don't wanna fund science,
and scientists, scientific organizations
don't wanna fund management.
But that's changing too, right?
Last year NSF put out this call for partnerships
to advance conservation science and practice.
And people are now taking even more novel routes, right?
So adaptation research in the Southwest is now funded
by this congressional bill.
So we're going right to the source,
right, to get money for these things.
So these things are changing.
And then last, we need to change our values.
And so obviously, not always,
but often the public values accountability,
scientists value learning, and funders
and practitioners value effectiveness.
But again, this is changing.
And so I was in a meeting the other day with folks,
with a lot of different folks and the superintendent
of Acadia National Park was there
and he was talking about how we need science
and learning to manage in a changing world.
And that was really refreshing to hear him talk like that.
So just to reiterate my take home messages
are we need more tests of these kinds of strategies.
Implementing multiple strategies simultaneously might be
a quicker way for us to learn.
Experimental adaptation has a lot
of potential secondary benefits,
but we need some systemic changes if we wanna see
wider application of these types of approaches.
And I'll just close and leave this up.
This is a paper that talks about this a lot more
in a lot more detail and it just came out last week.
So if you're interested, please check it out,
and I'll take some questions.
Yeah.
[Participant] Thanks so much for your great work.
So I have two questions about...
Maybe just to try to combine 'em.
One of them is the view
about the glossy buckhorn, Frangula alnus.
I imagine (audio cuts out) working
with Rhamnus cathartica, similar,
I don't know if you've heard of Mike Bald of Got Weeds,
but he has a strategy that it's quite effective.
We've used it on several restoration sites
where you cut once and bound tight
and then strip back two times in two seasons.
You get a 90% death rate.
So I was just wondering if they had applied that
to that site that became green.
It's a really good question.
We're starting an experiment.
We just got outta the field last week to find places
to test that exact strategy.
And so, how often do you have to go back and strip the trees
after you've cut them once to kill them?
And yeah, as you said, it's been done with common buckthorn,
but not necessarily with, at least
that I'm not aware of with glossy buckthorn.
And so, yeah, we're about to test that.
And so right now the Park Service uses pesticides.
They do cutting, but they also use pesticides.
They'd like to use a lot less pesticides.
So if we can kind of find a method like that
that works, we'd love to.
So yeah, it just depends.
If you have to go back every month
and strip it, then it's probably too much work
for the Park Service, yeah.
[Participant] And the other part was that nice portfolio
you've had with, you know, the grasses and then the shrubs.
I think, you know, a neat third would be like
the polyculture model.
Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Yeah.
And we thought about all sorts of stuff.
You know, seeding is really where we wanna go.
It's quicker, you don't have to dig the holes
and all that stuff, but we just, you know.
The hard part with these experiments
is there's a lot of potential things
to test and that's the bane of an experiment.
You can't do that.
And so, yeah, that's why we did.
But yeah, good thought.
Yeah. Thank you.
I think we have a question online.
[Presenter] Yeah, there.
I think Brandon is trying
to ask a question, although he's not, oh, here it is.
Thank you, Chris.
You alluded earlier that there are currently a ton
of potential strategies in your work you've found.
Have you found any that actually confound one another
that practitioners should be aware of
in their implementation
to assure each interval strategy is the most effective?
Hm.
Yeah, maybe I don't understand the question.
It's tough when they're online, but I think...
[Presenter] He said, have you found any
that actually confound one another?
Yeah, I mean, that's why we have
in that summit restoration plot,
we have this increasing genetic diversity
and adding pre-adapted individuals,
those are both increasing genetic diversity, right?
We're always bringing individuals from different locations.
And the reason we have those two treatments
is 'cause we just added pre-adapted individuals.
We wouldn't know if it's that we're getting individuals
from warmer sites
or is it that we're increasing genetic diversity?
What's the mechanism allowing that strategy to work?
So that's kind of why we are testing them both.
And that might sound esoteric, but it's a lot of work to try
to find these warm adapted populations, right?
And so if we don't have to do that
and we can just go get individuals from other places,
then that's a much simpler strategy.
So it's not really that esoteric.
So that is kind of a confounding strategy.
And just so you all know,
and at least right now preliminary data
from that experiment suggests neither
of those strategies is working.
[Presenter] I think you were wondering
if whether he's saying,
could one strategy cancel the other one out?
Have you found any?
Maybe you're implementing multiple-
I see, I see.
[Presenter] Are there any that you found
that could cancel each other out
that you don't really wanna be implementing
at the same time?
I see, yeah.
That is a good...
I can't think of a particular example off my head,
but yeah, that would be important.
And I think in the paper we talk about different ways
to kind of implement these experiments.
One way to get around that is, you know,
you could do different things at different sites.
You just need a lot more sites if you're gonna do that
to be able to weed out kind of the noise.
But yeah, so that'd be a way to get around this kind
of confounding two strategies in a safe place.
Yeah.
[Participant] Are you aware of any research
on biocontrol strategies for either buckthorn species?
I'm not.
Yeah. I don't know.
Just, do you guys know colleagues in the back?
No.
Yeah, I'm not aware of any biocontrol strategies for them.
Yeah.
Are you?
(audience laughs)
(garbled audio)
[Participant] Years of evolution, maybe.
Nah. (laughs)
So with all of that, thank you.