Hello, everybody.
My name is Jordon Tourville.
I'm a post-doctoral research fellow
with the Appalachian Mountain Club,
and I see a lot of familiar faces in here, so that's great.
I'm a forest, plant, and now mycorrhizal ecologist.
So quite a lot of things
and my primary focus of research these days
is on technology and generally how alpine ecosystems
are influenced by climate change
and how it affects community identity.
Chris.
[Chris] I'm Chris Nadeau.
I'm a climate adaptation scientist
with Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park.
So Schoodic Institute is a nonprofit science partner
to the National Park Service,
especially Acadia National Park.
One of the things we're focused on, among many,
many things is restoration on mountain summits.
And so we're actively restoring trampled areas
that have been degraded from years and years.
Trampling like many mountain summits in the Northeast,
so we're actively restoring soil
and vegetation to those summits.
And then of course,
we're interested in climate adaptation too,
given how vulnerable vegetation on our summits
might lead to climate change.
So we're doing some experiments
to try to test different climate adaptation strategies.
Yeah.
And we're really excited to be here in this group today
and learn, you know,
we're (indistinct) even call us mountains.
(laughs)
Definitely alpine, maybe high elevation.
But yeah, I'm interested to hear, you know,
what's going on in further west from where we are at.
Right on.
And so to further drill down into the point of all this.
So as you know,
Northeastern alpine ecosystems are quite uncommon,
quite rare.
Some people don't even call them true alpine,
but we're gonna go with that term today.
And obviously they've faced many threats,
but what we've been talking about all day,
I don't wanna spoil too much
'cause we're gonna get into that question a little bit.
But a couple of things to think about is climate change,
atmospheric deposition, issues with soil health,
trampling, invasive species.
So a whole gamut of place.
And so as practitioners and people
who care about these high elevation systems,
it (indistinct) to us to come up,
with perhaps some novel ways to deal with these issues.
And I know there's a lot of groups, for instance,
the Northeast Stewardship Group
that meets every couple of years
that brings practitioners together
to talk about these issues.
And the conversation between Chris and I, we think that,
you know, it would be good to host a series
of these kinds of workshops,
and it's what we're giving today,
to talk about what are some current threats
that everyone in this room is dealing with in these systems,
how we can better collaborate
and communicate across these disparate sites
and between our various organizations
and how would this manifest into a system
or a series of tools that we can all pitch together
and work from in a standardized fashion.
So that's really what we're trying to get at today
is what would a management toolbox specific
to alpine ecosystems look like in the future?
Where do we go from there?
That is the main goal or main thing we want to get at today.
And this is by no means a one-off thing.
We definitely want to follow up and then keep on this track
in the future and see what we can do
to better foster those collaborations.
So I think, unless you have anything to add.
The only thing I would add real quickly
is we know we split the room from the alpine folks,
at least somewhere across the hall,
there's another like snow monitoring, you know,
which is a lot of alpine folks are probably there.
We're also involved in that Northeastern snow survey,
Northeastern snow study project.
And so I'll maybe put a couple of these out.
There's some QR codes here for some surveys for some data.
And so if you're split and you kind of didn't know
whether you wanted to be here or there,
you can still kind of participate.
So maybe I'll just kind of, people,
we don't have a ton of doing left
if we wanna just pass some kind of, if you want it,
if you don't want it, push it along.
(indistinct)
Yeah.
And Georgie here sitting up front would be happy
to take questions about that at a later time.
[Chris] Yeah.
Yeah. (laughs)
Yeah, of course.
So what we're going to try to do today
are go through three facilitated series
of questions/breakout groups.
We have a series of online polls, you can fill out.
Hopefully, you all looked at the first one
that gives us sort of demographic information,
who you are, where you work,
what organizations you work with.
We're gonna take a look at that in a second.
But first, we're gonna get into questions
related to what are some current issues
that people care about in this sphere
and what is being currently done to either mitigate or deal
with climate adaptation strategies.
We're gonna discuss that and then we're gonna get
into some stressors that might become more prevalent
in the future and what the concerns are around that,
and what the thoughts are geared towards eliminating,
limiting those issues.
And then lastly, we're going to talk about what forms
or potential forms a management toolbox
or a series of standardized methods would look like,
and would be most useful for all of us here.
And then I'll do a quick wrap up, pass that if we have time.
So what we would like you to do first, if you don't mind,
would be to scan this code and take our little poll.
If you've already scanned it,
you're probably on there waiting for me
to unlock the questions, which I'll do right now.
[Jordon] Yes.
So Chris will unlock that.
If you haven't gone through the first series
of questions yet, please do so.
Those pretty much just ask where you work primarily,
some demographic questions that they mentioned.
And then it goes into this first question
of what stressors are currently impacting
high-elevation ecosystems that you're concerned about.
Hopefully, that works now.
While you're doing that, I'll just kind of present
kind of what you've already entered so far,
just so we kind of know who's in the room a little bit.
So we've got good split between folks from Maine,
Vermont, New Hampshire, which is great.
I bet we're all facing slightly different management issues
and how we're gonna deal with them.
Awesome, we've got folks from all sorts
of management agencies and academics.
So this is great.
I mean, I think as you saw from the agenda
that Jordon put up, you know,
we're done presenting kind of after right now. (laughs)
And this is gonna be a discussion between us, right?
We're here to learn from you
and I hope you all learn from each other too.
So yeah, it's great.
We have this diversity of folks.
Yeah, awesome.
And we've got practitioners and researchers
and both is great, other folks too.
But we can give you a couple minutes
to answer those questions.
Oh, we already got snow coming up.
People care about invasive species.
I hope you appreciate
this cool little word cloud application thing.
(audience laughing)
Amazing.
Do this.
And don't worry about (indistinct), we won't judge.
Nope.
Gets vomiting (indistinct).
And if you don't have a phone,
you can look over someone else's shoulder
and tell them what to put in.
Yeah, we're gonna-
[Audience Member] Can you put the QR code back up?
Yeah.
[Audience Member] Start over?
Something happened.
Uh-oh.
[Audience Member] Yeah, mine too.
Technological issues.
Should've seen the (indistinct).
[Audience Member] The QR code is right there.
Yeah, (indistinct).
Everybody got the QR code (indistinct).
Climate change just overtook invasive species.
That's reality right there.
(audience laughing)
(indistinct)
Or boosted them.
One of the two.
(audience laughing)
And obviously, there are some interactions
between all of these that perhaps the word cloud
doesn't happen with the capture.
So keep that in mind.
Yeah, sure.
So people can keep typing things in if they want,
but I think the hope is to, you know,
this is the word cloud for like what's currently impacting
unsurprisingly invasive species and climate change,
but many other things.
So we can talk about this for a few minutes.
And then the second question is,
how are we managing these things?
We can talk about that for a few minutes
and so we can open it up or you know,
if everybody's quiet then Jordon
and I are gonna pick on you guys.
So, whatever you want. (laughs)
Yeah.
Does anybody have something they want
that they put down that they like,
need to wanna talk more about?
[Audience Member] I think put this down,
but I'm curious to hear whoever put publicity
down to elaborate on that.
I put that down and was just thinking
about how it seems like so much recreation is increasing
because people are seeing photos of short places
and then also wanting to go there,
just like great increasing that that much fun.
So Instagram influencers
are boosting visitation essentially.
[Chris] Exactly, I get you.
Yeah.
Can somebody talk a little bit
about the invasive species issues?
That's not nothing, but would've come to my mind.
(audience laughing)
[Chris] Yeah.
We don't have a lot of.
What's going on with that?
(audience laughing)
[Audience Member] Well, we have (indistinct),
and the White Mountains,
actually maybe one of the most diverse invasive
or non-native species of any alpine areas in the world.
(indistinct)
Around the hunts, around the summits, along the auto road,
less so along the cog,
probably because it's completely destroyed,
but it's also less facing and more exposed.
And it seems to be in mostly in sheltered areas.
But there's higher richness towards treeline,
less as you go up in elevation.
But higher richness around infrastructure, that's the show.
And some of them are,
it's not limited to just disturbed areas.
They do seem to be spreading.
There are at least 15 to 20 locations of dandelions
in natural alpine areas,
including Great Gulf and the edge of Alpine Garden.
And so it's more than we knew
because I don't think anyone was really looking.
But yeah, for a long time.
What are some of the downstream effects
that stem from that?
Or do you see issues
with native plant communities dealing with this?
Are there feedbacks with soils?
[Audience Member] Feedback to.
Are there any feedbacks with soils changing conditions?
Like what's so bad about these days up there?
Besides that they're there.
[Audience Member] Yeah, well, they seem to get, quote,
start in disturbed areas, that's where they start.
But they don't seem to be limited to them.
They are becoming established in naturally disturbed areas
like ravine settings,
but not entirely restricted to disturbed soils
in ravine settings that can speak to that with gulf
and natural snowbank settings.
We have the proliferation of dandelions and certain areas.
They also seem to be spreading downstream
from the huts down into Brooks below the huts as an example.
So I think there's a lot more to be learned about it.
This is just kind of a baseline documentation
of where we're seeing what we're seeing where.
Got you.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
[Audience Member] Well, just real quickly
that this is not a vacuum,
this is happening in alpine areas around the world.
[Participant] It's still less (indistinct).
[Audience Member] Antarctic areas.
[Participant] It's greens, but certainly it is.
I would add to what Dan's saying,
is we all know invasives often grow,
undergo an exponential growth,
and they're kind of minimal now,
at least in Mansfield and very minimal on (indistinct),
now's the time to do something about it.
Not 10 years from now when we go back and say,
"Oh gee, we kind of dropped the ball on that, didn't we?
We should have done something."
[Audience Member] Are you seeing the same impacts
on like the Adirondack High Peaks, or God,
where there isn't really infrastructure?
[Participant] I don't think anyone knows
or probably a lot more limited than at this point
than what we have going on here.
But anecdotally, there're many fewer in the Atlantics
on the top.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] Well, back there,
general of way back (indistinct) so small.
[Participant] Yeah.
But back sizes has a chicken and pond.
Yeah, (indistinct).
Yeah.
And Mansfield at least, the just cursory,
look at that last summer
and there we found 10 or 12 species up.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
(indistinct)
[Participant] It's mostly near the road
and Summit Station.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] Just spreading out.
[Audience Member] I'm curious for folks
that book climate change
and I mean we have snow cover up here,
but climate change is very broad.
Does somebody wanna elaborate?
Like what about climate change?
Precipitation, temperature, something else.
Snow cover's up there, but it's something else.
[Participant] Short growing season probably,
(indistinct)
or lower more potential.
I don't know.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Unpredictable springs is up there and that is, you know,
one of the things is that climate change is more variable.
So it is year to year.
The variability is more,
so I think that whether it's warmer spring cold or spring,
warmer spring, you know, I think that may be a factor.
[Audience Member] Yeah, that, I'd put that up there.
I also put up climate variabilities.
(audience laughing)
Just to kind of boost the world.
(audience laughing)
Variability, definitely.
[Audience Member] Yeah, you know,
to what extent the natural cues
that plants have used involved too,
or many generations are becoming less predictable
to track now.
[Participant] Yeah, yeah.
[Audience Member] I would add the potential
for torrential main storms, the summer,
and results scouring, erosion,
especially on those thin alpine soils.
[Participant] Yeah.
[Audience Member] July 11th example, you know,
I don't know that Mansfield or the White Mountains got hit,
but they could have (indistinct).
I think we'll have more time to talk about this,
'cause I think a lot of this,
we're gonna talk about future threats in one second
in about two minutes.
And so if you have other thoughts,
you're gonna get into small groups and talk about this.
So I think you can talk about it more not to,
it's a lively conversation.
You can cut it off.
But this is kind of what we said, that's what's happening.
This is kind of what we're doing about it.
Education seems to be prominent in the middle.
So what do you mean by,
like education about what should we be teaching?
[Audience Member] Like the summer steward programs,
trying to keep people from trampling.
Yeah.
So roping off.
[Audience Member] Roping off, directing people.
And dogs on leashes. (laughs)
That's a big one.
I would think just education about the basic significance
of these rare, highly restricted sensitive habitats
and species that you know,
'cause especially places like Mount Washington
where people just drive up the toll road
and they've got no clue, and oh, it's grass.
No, actually it's Bigelow sets
and you're trampling all over it.
(indistinct)
Yeah.
What sort of formats
does that education come in that people practice here?
I think the summer stewards program
that are across many of our organizations,
I think it's really, really important,
the people that are there when people are stepping on them,
and say, "Hey, by the way.
You know, this is a really important plant."
So, having people in the field in summit stewards program.
Got you.
[Audience Member] There are some good examples
of that in the White Mountains,
but I think we have a lot less
of that going on in the White Mountains.
(indistinct)
Summit stewards.
Anybody else wanna comment
on what they put up on this cloud?
It's much more variable.
There's not a lot of big options up there.
[Audience Member] Can I just ask
who put assisted migration down?
And it wasn't where we were doing.
(audience laughing)
[Participant] There is migration going on,
until we're been seeing now.
(indistinct)
Gotcha.
And at least from my point of view,
(indistinct)
let's stop.
(indistinct)
We want.
(indistinct)
[Audience Member] And to go with that,
I would say, I don't know if this is a management action,
but I think we need a lot more info on the genetics
to understand some of the nuance of those issues, right?
Yeah, any other quick comments on this?
We were gonna transition to our second breakout/poll,
but definitely a couple minutes if you wanna,
if anyone had any pressing thing they wanted to say here.
Yes.
[Audience Member] A question about one
of the climate impacts.
Somebody said increasing tree lock,
but I know that for so long I've been hearing
that the alpine zone are very obviously expected to shrink
with the change in climate.
And I'm wondering if that's something
we have any monitoring data on,
if we know the actual acreage of like alpine specific plants
is specifically shrinking in response
to an encroaching tree line.
Yes.
[Audience Member] I just don't know the answer to that.
We do, we do.
I just published a paper about that.
[Audience Member] I guess I asked the right person.
(audience laughing)
Right.
Yeah, I won't get too much into it just for sake of time.
I'll just say that yes, that work has been done.
The exact numbers are a little fuzzy
just because of using the old imagery
to actually compare old treeline locations
to contemporary ones.
I will say there is evidence of crumble (indistinct),
and some encroachment.
Although, you know, based on your definition of treeline,
that could be significant or not so much.
So we could talk about that more.
But yes, there has been work that's done that,
in this region, yeah.
[Audience Member] Yeah, I was just thinking, looking,
I see that little climate policy links, you know,
I think it behooves you as you move forward,
just make sure that things are bifurcated into things
that are under the control of the local managers,
which almost everything there is focused on.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] And then there's the big global question
of climate change, which is-
Right, that's a great point.
Yeah.
Yeah, we work in this context of exterior
and sometimes internal forces that are acting
to exacerbate these issues, but yeah.
[Audience Member] I just had a general observation
that that list of strategies which I don't know
how significant this is,
but I just was thinking that it probably wouldn't look
that different if you asked that question 20 years ago
or maybe even 30 or 48 years ago.
And I don't know, just sort of observing that,
but the strategies have been consistent over time.
It seems like there's not a lot many new ideas,
other than like genetics research.
Not saying that's good or bad, just observing.
Yeah, no, I get your point.
Yeah, I think that's part of the reason
why we wanted to bring people together
'cause I think it might be time to start
to insert some of these fresh ideas into the conversation,
maybe things we haven't considered yet
or maybe were perhaps too extreme in the past to consider.
But yeah, it's a well taken point for sure.
How much can we even actively do in these areas?
[Chris] We have one person online,
or we don't have anybody online.
We have several.
I believe one.
Okay, if they want, write something in the chat
or whoever they're contributing,
like feel free to do so and we can read it out.
Yeah.
[Chris] Okay.
We'll transition to blank.
Yeah.
[Chris] And we can transition to the next part.
And it's really a continuation of this conversation,
so if you wanna, we'll let people think.
I'll pass them in a second, I know.
So I think what we're gonna do now
is do kind of a breakout group
and so we'll break out into what, maybe four or three?
There's not that many.
Maybe four.
Okay, we got into four groups.
But first, we're gonna ask you to think kind
of independently on this question, ignore the typo.
I tried to fix it while you weren't looking at.
(audience laughing)
So it is what it is, it's my fault.
So yeah, I'll take the responsibility for that.
So yeah, we're gonna do this thing eventually.
It's essentially called Think, Group, Share, right?
So think on your own for a second about these questions.
And so, what do you expect, you know,
kind of like we just talked about but in the future,
what do you expect to be the stressors in the future?
How might we manage those stressors?
And then, you know,
what is limiting our ability to do that management?
In other words like what research can we do
to help managers be able to do that?
And we'll, when you get into groups,
we'll pass out these worksheets that you can use
that just have those three categories,
stressor management and management limitation,
so we'll let you think for a couple minutes on your own
so you don't get too much group think
and then we'll break out into small groups
and have you fill these out, is that right?
[Jordon] Yeah, and when we get to those groups,
if you could assign someone to just fill out the sheet
and then assign someone to report back out,
to the rest of the group when we meet back up.
Okay, cool, yeah.
So we'll just give you a minute to,
and you can talk lightly amongst yourselves
so it's not super.
(audience laughing)
But mostly, you know, have your own thoughts on this.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
Okay, if you guys wanna like just be into the groups
of you're on, just try to split evenly.
Maybe not, you know,
if you're friends here and you always talk to them
about this, go in a different group
'cause the whole point is to like learn from each other.
So yeah, split up and go to the four corners
of the room maybe.
And you can take chairs with you, whatever you want.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] But you know,
I've been going up there for 30 months.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] Craft an education.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] So the management strategy for,
we talked about like conceptual fences for summertime.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] I just point out the AMC has winter,
they also legally we have to check on.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] So it's not 20%,
but there're people that could be some sort
of accommodation.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] That was funding to support the plan.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] What would the signage say?
Like stay on trail?
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] And then you have million other entities
out there.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] That works very well.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] I think the forest talks about this,
right?
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] Or their motivations are different.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
Throw an idea.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
If you don't mind bringing it all together.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
We're gonna (indistinct), see what you found.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
Well, I mean you don't have to move too far
if you don't want to. (laughs)
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] Yeah.
I'm gonna ask you guys to join in,
because I don't (indistinct).
All right.
So people who are volunteering to report back out,
how we think this would go well is each group wants
to read one row on their sheet that they put down,
and try to avoid replicating ideas,
just so we have a more diverse set of thoughts on this.
Would anyone go first?
(indistinct)
Okay, we have a volunteer.
I was gonna volunteer Georgia. (laughs)
[Audience Member] Heavier rain events.
Okay.
[Audience Member] Which is a future stressor.
Management strategy for that to be restoration of soil
and vegetation communities on summits.
Obviously, we need to show the soil
and keep it in place for native plants.
It's gonna help prevent erosion.
However, there are manual limitations,
but of course how to correctly restore soil
in these vegetation communities.
It's not something that's easily done.
We probably don't know really how best to do this yet,
as well as it could be expensive every time.
Sounds like you have a personal experience from names
that you could share on this topic (laughs) if you want.
[Audience Member] Right now?
Yeah, go for it.
[Audience Member] Sure.
So this is largely actually from, you know,
a lot of this that I spoke about from the first sort
of phase that we've done on Cadillac (indistinct) park,
where we sort of tried a different bunch
of different experimental restoration plots,
looking at a bunch of different methods
and trying to figure out how best we can restore vegetation
to these degraded summits.
And the long story short is it seems like adding soil
and not too much soil, just a little bit,
and being able to keep it in place
is probably the best method that we can
out of these ones that we tested,
the best way that we can go forward with that quick sum.
And just add to that, we're continuing that research now.
So we did that research on Cadillac Mountain,
which you can drive a chart at the top of,
and we dump truck full of soil for sure.
We're continuing that research now on more remote summits.
So this year we moved 3,750 pounds of soil to the summits
of Sargent and Penobscot mountains
using 200 volunteer people with backpacks.
And so it's doable, (laughs) but yeah.
And we're testing more methods for restoring mosses
and lichens and other methods too.
So I don't wanna dominate,
but that's what a sterilized soil.
So we can talk about it.
Done.
(indistinct)
[Audience Member] Alright,
so trail impacts from increased recreation.
Management strategies could be better messaging
and enforcement, infrastructure, trail design,
if I forget something, they'll help me.
Botany soils trails integration.
Oh, that was a specific example from Crawford Notch
where Dan mentioned that all of the great mines
came together, the botanists, the soils,
the trail people, and made an integrated decision
about how to modify that trail to basically make it,
you know, so that they wouldn't be coming back
to it in five years,
that it would be more of a hundred year thing.
But that means that some of those, you know,
pieces had to give a little, botany versus soil.
So, versus the trail size.
So, but it was a good example
of that you need all those people to come together
and work together.
One of the things that we talked
about management limitations was an example
around back country skiing.
It, you know, can cause damage to alpine zones
because they're trampling plants to get
to that last little patch of snow to ski on,
and how do we really, you know, manage for that.
So I don't, I'm not sure,
it just seemed like that was one of the ones
that we kind of stumbled on as something
that was more challenging and it would be harder to manage.
The major limitation under this stressor
is sort the ability of the managing entity
to control the level of use of an area.
And that's, as we mentioned, all the other publicity sources
that are driving users to these sites.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
So we did have limited capacity with permits
was another strategy that has been shown to help.
But, you know, not everybody likes that answer.
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
Another group.
[Audience Member] Can we go next?
Sure.
[Audience Member] We'll pick right up from that, I think.
We talked a lot about wintertime recreation
and think it's definitely
there's so much more interest in it.
And I'm a backcountry skier.
I love getting out in the winter and so I think it is,
you know, there's the strategies I think,
and it's not just skiing, but also mountaineering,
and crampons I think could be really damaging.
And the snow packs aren't always that deep, even midwinter.
So we talked about a couple of different strategies.
We're not sure they all have their limitations,
so they sort of dovetail between columns two and three,
I guess.
But one is, you know, can you,
you don't see the trail typically in the winter
above treeline.
So like the old string or conceptual fences
aren't as effective.
So is there a way that we could design signage
that might bring attention to,
if it's an area that, you know,
you can travel through in a sustainable way,
and if so, you know, is there,
or should there be areas to direct traffic
in a certain location or otherwise raise awareness?
We also talked about the kind of crazy idea
while there's summertime Summit Steward,
it's good there be some winter time Summit Steward.
And we're like, well, some people might actually kind
of dig that at least on weekends.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] On a volunteer of hot chocolate.
Right. (laughs)
Thermos of hot tea.
Challenges or limitations or how do you reach your audience
and recognizing that as probably a different audience
in the summertime audience in terms of recreation impact,
which you know, has challenges,
but also there may be also going to be receptive to,
you know, perhaps the average level of outdoor awareness
and how to move through the challenging environments
is slightly higher than the average summertime visitor.
And so that could be an opportunity to,
any other limitation or yeah,
limitations that we came up with?
How do we reach that audience?
How do you do it?
How do you do it in a way
that is encouraging behavioral change without being punitive
and nobody wants to be an enforcer,
but that's kind of an old theme, I guess.
[Participant] Yeah.
[Audience Member] That was most
of what we spent our time talking about.
I brought up at the very end and I think there would,
it would've been nice to hear more conversation about, but,
so we didn't get to chat about this as a group too much,
but if the, so this would be a new line.
So future stressors being demographic reductions
of plant species due to a variety of different causes.
And management strategies, demographic reduction,
so you know, reductions in population size,
abundance, distribution.
Of plants.
[Audience Member] Of plants, yeah.
I guess, yeah.
That's what we care about here.
[Audience Member] Great.
Apologize.
It's tricky.
I mean there's a lot of restoration theory
and practice out there on how to deal
with demographic reductions, right?
In terms of,
Bob brought up treating the symptom versus the cause.
So, you know, you can get the population size
back up through various mechanisms,
but are you addressing the underlying
cause of the reduction?
So that's probably also a limitation in terms of research
and how to do it, you know,
what knowledge would we need to guide some of those choices
and is there even facilities and processes in place
to help with that?
And then Bob also brought up the idea
of maybe one thing we should be doing
is thinking about banking seeds too and you know,
I'll add keeping provenance records on those seed banks.
[Participant] Steve also briefly touched the subject
of augmentation.
[Audience Member] Yeah, right,
as part of the management strategy.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] Right, yeah.
[Participant] Yeah.
[Audience Member] I pretended I didn't get that. (laughs)
Augmentation, like adaptive genotypes or species,
is that what you mean by augmentation?
[Audience Member] Or even augmentation of, you know,
even if it's the local provenance,
but you know, growing and planting.
Yeah, you could collect seeds, (indistinct) them,
and then put them back in place.
[Audience Member] Right.
Subsequent years.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
(indistinct)
[Participant] Like that augment.
[Audience Member] Right, yeah.
Well, definitely continue about that conversation
outside of this for sure because it's really (indistinct).
[Audience Member] Anything else, group?
That we wanted to put out there.
[Participant] We talked about dogs quite a bit.
(audience laughing)
We can maybe come back around.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Okay.
Addition.
[Audience Member] Yeah, sure.
How about the group in the back?
[Audience Member] Well, this kind of builds
on that last one and we have this,
the term for the future stressor, shrubification.
(indistinct)
I think it's really about any changes in vegetation,
whether it's changing dynamics of the vegetation
that's already there or new things coming in.
And the strategy, it's not even a strategy,
it was more a question, do we manage the vegetation?
And then the limitations are there's practical limitations
of management designations like wilderness areas
that might influence that.
There's, I think the philosophical discussions
around management in those places
become that way more visible and focused.
And then there's just the whole question
of unintended consequences
about really knowing what's gonna happen.
So I'm hearing sort of this question
about whether or not we should be more hands-on
or hands-off.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Okay.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Good way to sum it.
Yeah.
I'm curious before we go,
maybe we can go back around one more time quickly to that.
[Jordon] Sure, yeah.
If there's anything else people want to add to that.
But I'm curious, since we are talking mostly plants here
and that's where my brain is too,
but is somebody else like not thinking
about plants that suck?
(audience laughing)
[Audience Member] Yes.
[Participant] But I mean, but it relates to plants
in the long term.
But when we talk about like something in the near future,
that's why I kind of like pulled back
'cause this is gonna be like a long term thing.
As climate changes and soils warm, they become more active.
Your microorganisms are starting to break down those,
that organic matter and those alpine soils
that has been kind of just like hanging out there
as a nice source of food for plants.
And so that's going to decrease,
your productivity will diminish over time
if you're not inputting something back into it.
And that's not typically the plant community that does that.
That's why it works down lower
where you've got all the glitter layer and woody debris.
And so the alpine zone in general is gonna face difficulty
in the soils realm as far as soil productivity goes.
So then it, but it's how do you get after that?
So we just burn more fossil fuels.
(audience laughing)
More dogs.
(audience laughing)
(indistinct)
[Audience Member] That's a very good point.
[Participant] Yeah.
(indistinct)
Let's throw that in.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
So, and understanding like if you do have an influx
of invasives that can shift your microbiome
and then if you do get a bunch of it
and then you have to go in and manually remove it,
then you've got that manual impact to the soil.
So like erosion, further degradation.
So everything relates to soil.
(audience laughing)
Yes, I would fundamentally agree with that.
And pair material.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
So we're doing some small mammal work or we not,
Brittany Slovak is doing some small mammal work on our,
but is there anybody else that's doing like,
not even related to vegetation at all?
It's really vegetation and soil.
Well, I'll just throw out, it's not any research,
just observations to get us out of the plant realm.
Although of course it comes back to the plants.
Having made multiple observations of woodchucks
coming up above treeline in the White Mountains.
And maybe this is just a different aspect of the,
sort of the shrubification sort of topic of changes
in who's up there in terms of plants and animals
and do we do anything about that?
I don't really know what the historical role
of woodchucks in the alpine zone was, for instance.
But they go up there and they root around,
and cause disturbance that then can create sites for,
you know, invasives or just erosion and things like that.
And so there may be animal changes that happen up there
as well as change.
[Audience Member] They bite through my sensor cables.
(audience laughing)
[Participant] Just to bring animals in, birds signal,
brush, tippets, will they continue to have a habitat
to nest in?
And their surveys are going on.
(indistinct)
Luca studies to.
Also, there are two butterflies, the (indistinct),
that are rarities, that habitat little known,
post plants, even less, so there are some challenges.
[Audience Member] Pollinators.
Pollinators.
See?
We can talk about it.
(audience laughing)
If forced to.
[Audience Member] Yeah, Melissa, at the butterflies.
Regina Melissa.
(indistinct)
Yeah.
We're gonna transition to talking about kind
of management toolbox ideas since Seth's point.
But does anybody have any last thoughts that they,
we don't feel like we captured that we need to share?
Yeah, lots of people.
(audience laughing)
Maybe same one.
Just trail decision, like trail network decisions do,
maybe we need to close some trails sometimes
if they're in bad locations where built poorly.
That's something we,
that some people of forest service are asking every time.
We have a fairly relocated project,
and we're also a group of us are really looking,
wanna look at forest wide where we have bog bridging
and high elevation areas and trying to relocate cradle
to less sensitive areas.
So we have a couple of examples of where we're,
we're doing that now, relocating.
[Audience Member] I think my contribution
is the management strategy to that, no, is well,
one piece of it would be to do a comprehensive hydrological
study of future climate and where those weak points
are in the trail network and where we should be thinking
about closing and relocating bugs and bridges and so forth.
So I think it's a piece of how do you make those decisions
so you're not going back and making them again
is doing some modeling around the hydrological feature
of these networks.
Well.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Audience Member] We talked about how the large scale
systemic climate change issue
is not really necessarily separate from the issue
of interacting with people who are up in the alpine zone
and how the alpine zone provides a path to talk
to people about larger climate policy issues.
But then a challenge of that is that the message could be,
is often really simplified.
Like it's getting warmer, the alpine zone is gonna creep up,
and disappear and that it's not as simple temperature rises,
things are gone,
that there's all these other climate factors.
And so being able to do that while keeping nuance, but yeah.
But engaging that audience.
That makes sense.
Yeah, warming's one component of the global change issue.
All right.
Transition.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] We need that QR code.
Is that it?
[Audience Member] Yeah, that's it.
Go ahead.
You wanna introduce it?
Want me to?
Yeah.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
So we're gonna transition to talking about kind of,
you know, we talked about a lot of management issues,
future issues, limitations.
And so, you know, what Jordon and I are really interested
in is, you know, if we were to produce a management toolbox
that would be helpful to managers, you know,
academics produce management toolbox all the time
that aren't helpful to managers necessarily.
So we wanna do something that's helpful, right?
What would that look like?
And so the first question is kind of what resources,
the question on the poll I think is kind
of what resources would you want?
And then, so we're gonna have you fill out this poll again,
if you don't mind.
And it'll pop up on a word cloud, I think.
And then, but then we'll just jump right into discussion
about, you know, what resources are needed
and what format should we be providing those in.
Do we wanna create a website?
Do we just wanna report that's gonna get on a dusty shelf?
Do we want a network of people
that talk like we have right now?
Like, you know, that Josh Benish has already,
you know, those are just ideas.
We want creative ideas.
So does that make sense?
Great.
Okay, so we'll just give people a couple of minutes
for the poll and then we can just jump into this sort
of freeform discussion like the kind of have been doing.
It's the, can you access the question? (indistinct)
[Audience Member] Skip all the other ones.
(indistinct)
[Participant] You might get us all going back
to the beginning.
There you go.
Again.
Sorry, you went back to the beginning.
I didn't realize that would happen.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] The online, person can jump in anytime.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] Is it working?
If you go into the old, the previous one.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Participant] Skip on.
[Audience Member] Oh, really?
[Participant] Yeah, if you can.
[Audience Member] That's fine.
[Participant] Okay, thank you.
I think you can't get your interest in,
don't worry too much about it if you missed that.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Audience Member] I just was trying to get.
(indistinct)
Helpful.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] Sorry.
(audience laughing)
Everyone good with the QR codes?
They still need it or?
I guess as these are popping up,
if anyone wants to jump in and just kind
of explain what they mean by what they put down,
please feel free to do so.
[Audience Member] Curious for the citizen science
projects, what data do we want citizen scientists
to be collecting for us that would help us to.
Chronology.
[Audience Member] And how does chronology help us
with management?
[Audience Member] It helps us understand
which species are responding to climate change
and which ones are not.
[Audience Member] Gotcha.
Okay.
[Participant] Yeah, I didn't put this up,
but it was what I was thinking before I screwed up the poll.
(audience laughing)
[Participant] But the library of papers, you know,
thinking there's probably already been a lot
of work done on like alpine trail design and location
and things like sea maybe, so I think, you know,
the first step is with it's already (indistinct)
a good management of practices and are there things going
on where we don't have a good sense of how we deal with it?
So you compile what we know
and then try to think about what we need to know.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
(indistinct)
[Audience Member] Think about- (indistinct)
[Participant] I think the basic species
would be an example where you might have
to develop your own guidelines.
[Participant] I see.
Yeah.
So synthesizing the literature, identifying gaps,
that's something we actually talked a lot.
I hope you reviewer on the proposal
that Jordon and I just submitted not too long ago.
[Audience Member] Exactly.
[Participant] And Doug had a waterman grant
to synthesize alpine literature.
So there is a waterman product out there.
Bibliography.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Cool.
[Audience Member] How long ago was that done?
Sorry.
[Audience Member] Maybe five years ago.
[Participant] Okay, it's very recent.
[Audience Member] Yeah, one of the takeaways
from the stewardship gatherings
was that there are some management techniques
that are developing and work better than others.
Things like string fencing, use of blazing that are new,
and actually a gathering where one,
a group is talking to another.
So when the Baxter people talk to the Adirondack people,
it promotes things and that's what the gathering really one
of their major advances is.
So I think opening the communication among the practitioners
is absolutely necessary, to speak and so.
And has that already done
by like the Alpine Stewardship meeting
that's every other year?
Whatever is that, is that accomplishing that,
or is it we, more (indistinct).
[Audience Member] Yeah, but it's new every year,
every meeting.
I see.
[Audience Member] There's some holdovers.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] It's serving that purpose.
But it would be nice to formalize.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] On some of that.
Okay.
[Audience Member] Correct me if I'm wrong.
I did get the impression that you meet every couple years,
but then the communication sort
of dies down a little bit in the interim time.
Yep.
[Audience Member] Yeah, for the most part.
Yeah.
Areas that are close to one another, (indistinct)
talks to Franconia.
[Chris] Right.
[Audience Member] But no one talks to Baxter
and every two years they-
They come out of the North Woods, a few of them.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Jordon] So developing some sort of network
where that communication can happen.
[Audience Member] Outside of.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
[Jordon] Yeah, some sort of mechanism.
[Audience Member] Things that strikes me
about this is that, and maybe this spins off,
from the stewardship gathering is one of the things
that's great about it is that it brings together everyone
from like the trail crew people
who are like placing rocks on the ground
to the academic researchers to, you know,
compare experiences and share ideas
and you really need that whole broad spectrum
of things in this toolbox, whatever form it takes.
And thinking about the recreational use,
it's everything from, you know,
how are we driving people to these sites?
How do we, you know, large scale trail design,
which trails should we close to, you know, to very,
very microsite specific decisions
and practices in trail work?
And so really that's a huge gamut of different types
of very specific skills and planning processes
and all of that to try to encompass into a box.
But you need all those pieces, right?
[Audience Member] I tried to write my response
on the thing, but for some reason it's not showing.
(audience laughing)
Maybe it didn't like my idea,
but (indistinct) to go back to the soil microbiome
that you were talking about earlier,
and maybe like creating a library
of like different alpine zones in New England,
collecting both like soil microbiome information,
but also like (indistinct) and sphere information
of the alpine plants that exist in those communities,
and just being able to like build a library,
understand like what complete microbial diversity
like exists in this system.
[Jordon] I'm working on that.
Slowly but surely.
[Audience Member] So I had the same problem with my,
put in one answer and then it wouldn't let me put
in the second one.
The one that didn't show up is more information
about the genetics about alpine plants.
I mean, Steve's suggestion, if we wanted to pursue,
I mean, not that I'm going there, please,
if we wanted to consider augmentation,
we need to know more about the genetics.
I mean, do we, you know, take from onsite
or is there a potential bottleneck, these plants?
[Audience Member] Exactly.
[Participant] I mean these islands essentially in the sky.
So they've been interbreeding
or inbred for like hundreds,
maybe thousands of years, who knows since the last ice age?
So do we wanna increase the diversity
and takes some plants from the White Mountains
and bring them over to the Green Mountains?
Vice versa.
But I wouldn't dare even consider that,
unless we had some genetic work
to look into what we're doing.
We're kind of playing God here,
but yeah, we may come to that, so.
I book conservation genetics though.
(indistinct)
[Audience Member] Sorry.
No, that's great.
Yeah.
And I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
Steve or anybody else that knows about genetics, you know,
I think even beyond just doing the genetics,
like let's start doing some breeding studies
like in the greenhouse or something
where we take two (indistinct),
my favorite plant from the whites and the Cadillac
and like make them hybridize
and like see what happens to those.
[Audience Member] Right.
[Participant] It may already be happening.
Right.
Sure, yeah.
In the wild, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It might.
[Audience Member] The jury's fell out on that.
[Audience Member] Right,
because one of the cautionary principles
of any kind of conservation genetics is, you know,
do no harm, of course.
And so that brings in questions
of operating depression, right?
And so you can assess that to some extent
from DNA data,
but crossing data is a really nice compliment to that too.
So yeah, being able to assess what the fitness effects
of out crossing between populations would be really nice.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] I just wanted to reiterate how nice
it would be to,
in the years in between the Northeast stewardship gap
alpine gathering have, like something in that space,
because it does go really quiet.
And so having a space to do things,
where there's opportunities to meet at something like,
or to go on a field trip to like see management actions
in person at specific site,
like I think that would fill a gap that is definitely there.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
It's kind of forum for communicating.
[Participant] Yeah.
[Audience Member] Even if it's remote.
[Participant] Right.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Yeah, I was gonna ask that as a remote.
Like, you know, like Josh, Ben does this,
like you guys know more about it than me,
but this monthly kind of the names group (indistinct).
[Jordon] Yeah.
Yeah.
Forget the, for what its (indistinct).
Yeah, but it's online, right?
It's virtual and there's a presentation every month
and then there's, you know,
lots of people probably attend it, right?
But it's virtual and I don't know how the people
like virtual, we're all so sick of it.
[Audience Member] It's nice to keep a conversation going
with people you don't get to see on a monthly basis.
So that's, it's really effective for that.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] I like the approach
of something virtual, but also if we could manage
to gather people together more of a casual way,
that would be cool.
[Audience Member] I would also say
I put up coordinated monitoring.
I feel like there's a lot of monitoring going on,
but it's right now mostly, you know, individual protocols.
And I think there seems to be,
I'm still getting to know the community
and so maybe there's more coordination going
on than I'm aware of.
And maybe there's push in that direction,
but it seems like that could be something
that could be a focus and emphasized,
and it's part of the communication piece too.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] We definitely need an archive.
And that really means finding a host.
At some point, The Waterman Fund considered themselves,
but they haven't presented a legitimate and so,
and it is a big management tool.
I mean getting an archive up and curating and QA,
QC and a whole bunch of other things is a challenge.
But the Alpine community information
is relatively small compared to most big archives, so.
[Audience Member] You consider envisioning sort
of like a database or some sort of structure for a database?
[Participant] A database, yeah.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
Similar to what FBMC.
[Participant] It's not like a library of papers.
And it's a library of data.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] Yeah.
You know, joining in with a group like FBMC makes a lot
of sense where they've already got some structure.
So that may, whether that's the right one,
but certainly not trying to reinvent the wheel that way.
Some of that, you know,
management is not as heavy of a lift.
[Jordon] So like a subgroup
within that existing structure.
[Audience Member] Yeah,
I think I just throw also establishing connections
with alpine managers and people interested in alpine stuff
outside of our region.
We sometimes get stuck
in our little England alpine sites bubble, but they're both,
there's a whole bunch of sites north of the border
and Quebec and you know, Newland, Labrador, and so forth.
But then also reaching out to the west.
There's been some dialogue recently
about even just basic levels of, you know,
establishing species lists of alpine species
across the continent and things like that to form a baseline
for conservation of alpine systems.
So making some of those connections more broadly.
Yeah.
[Audience Member] Jump over the Rockies,
go to Alaska that.
(audience chattering indistinctly)
(audience laughing)
[Jordon] No, I like that.
Especially with our Canadian counterparts
'cause I feel like we now be able to really talk to them.
I think there was one or two people at the last stewardship.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] Yeah.
[Audience Member] In general,
Canadians know what we are doing.
We do not know.
(audience laughing)
They always know.
[Audience Member] Well, Mike Jones
has made some good relations and so he's probably
a good person too.
[Participant] I think we may need to kind
of break some inertia within a lot of organizations to kind
of do new things and make progress.
You know, I was pointing out earlier
that we don't have a very robust alpine stewardship program
in New Hampshire.
Not to undermine things that are going on,
but they're primarily volunteer based.
[Audience Member] Yeah.
[Participant] We need institutions
speaking personally now, institutions that have stepped up,
some of which are in room or at least that would be my,
like we can find resources, more funding,
and initiative to do some new things and leadership
and funding to do it.
But things and it's, we have,
there's one small step in that direction.
So we did just get some BIL budget infrastructure
legislation funding to have an invasive species control plan
put together.
And we're looking at our state partner
of New Hampshire Natural Heritage Bureau
to help us put that together.
So that would be, the idea would be to identify inventory
and monitoring needs and some initial control strategies,
prioritizing where we would do just,
what species of what sites.
So just kind of get that out there.
Try to get partners engaged, you know,
National Forest, Auto Road, AMC state parks.
So it's maybe a good example
where we're gonna put this together and put it out there
and see if we get engagement and that might, you know,
we'll need each of those institutions
to kind of buy into it for their part of it.
What will be.
(indistinct)
(audience laughing)
That would be fun.
Any other points not brought up yet?
I think it was a pretty good discussion.
[Audience Member] Yeah, it's super useful.
[Jordon] Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
So I guess we got a few minutes left.
I'll just give you a quick little spiel.
So, you know, one of our big concerns was that, you know,
we bring you all together, we talk about this,
and then there would be a fall off of enthusiasm that,
enthusiasm after that, after that,
and we would just (indistinct).
We would definitely wanna follow up with you,
keep this dream alive.
We're going to summarize what we talked about today
and to hopefully share it with you all.
You have opportunity and poll
to put your personal information, I do believe.
And if you did not, we have a signup sheet back there
or a piece of paper back there.
So if you wanna put your contact info
and you didn't get a chance to, please do so.
We can share what we found with you all.
What we would like to do in the future, depending on funding
and available time and resources and all that,
is to plan additional meetings to get us all together
and additional practitioners together
to talk about these ideas further.
This would either be hosted by one of our organizations
or through an existing meeting.
So for instance, next year's alpine stewardship meeting,
we could circle back to some of these ideas as well.
Chris and I have proposals in place
to do some really cool new institute field
or institute experiments.
So in the field, test some of our hypothesis around,
how climate change and warming
will impact alpine vegetation.
I know there's a lot of people in this room
who are academic types who have similar plans
to do really cool stuff in the Alpine.
So we definitely wanna follow through with that,
and see how everyone is bearing there.
Ideally the result of all this will be some sort of product
or a series of products that will, you know,
form this management toolbox.
It may not be a physical thing, it could be database list
of papers, place where people can talk, series of meetings.
But we're not sure exactly what this will all look like.
But we're hoping that whatever we do fostered
increased collaboration,
communication between us all and we can draw
from a standardized set of techniques and methods
to address the critical problems facing these systems.
Do you have anything you'd like to add to all that?
No, that was great.
Exactly right.
[Jordon] Yeah.
And so if you wanna follow up with us directly,
this is our contact info, feel free to email me anytime.
I will respond.
(audience laughing)
We're pretty good at that.
And yeah, I think that's it.
Yeah.
I hope everybody enjoyed, learned something from each other,
and we didn't have (indistinct).