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News & Features
From the Idyllwild Town Crier weekly newspaper, 08.14.08 edition.
Climate
change affecting mountains
By J.P. Crumrine, Assistant Editor
According to two University of California, Irvine (UCI) researchers,
vegetation surveys — 30 years apart — in the Santa Rosa Mountains
demonstrate the gradual shifting of plant ranges up the mountains. Anne
E. Kelly and Michael L. Goulden’s paper, “Rapid shifts in plant
distribution with recent climate change,” was published online in this
week’s Proceedings of the National Association of Science.
Global warming and climate change are no longer theoretical forces
foreign to the Hill. Nor are they political issues embedded in the
debates between Republicans and Democrats.
Concentrating on the 10 most widely distributed plants in the Deep
Canyon area, Kelly and Goulden discovered that the plant species were
moving toward higher elevations. Over the 30-year period from 1977 to
2007, various plant communities’ starting range, including Jeffrey
Pine, moved about 212 feet up the mountainside.
“Our results imply that surprisingly rapid shifts in the distribution
of plants can be expected with climate change,” the authors concluded.
Kelly and Goulden were able to eliminate fire behavior, firefighting
and air pollution (ozone) as causes for the plants’ movement. The only
conclusion was that the changing climate on the Hill had affected the
vegetation’s distribution.
From 1977 to 2007, the average temperature rose almost 2 degrees,
precipitation decreased and snowfall declined as a percentage of total
precipitation.
Jan Zabiskie conducted the original study in 1977. He also assisted the
current study’s authors to identify measuring sites. The study area
began at about 800 feet and rose to 8,400 feet over an almost 10-mile
span.
Originally, Goulden had plans to conduct a different study in the
Pinyon Flat neighborhood. However, the many local references to global
warming effects raised his curiousity. Eventually, he and Kelly decided
to replicate Zabiskie’s inventory up the mountain.
They found that the stress the recent drought from 1999 to 2002 created
led to many plant deaths. But as individual plants died out, they were
replaced by nearby species rather than their own seedlings.
“This is the first study that we know to identify a wide-scale response
to climate change,” Kelly said. “The observed upslope movement is a
result of shifting dominance within existing communities, rather than
the expansion of ranges to new elevations.”
Kelly, who earned her bachelor’s degree from the California Institute
of Technology and her master’s from California State University, Los
Angeles, is working toward her doctorate at UCI under Goulden.
When she graduates, she hopes to take her field experience and seek a
research position with a federal land management agency.
When asked what the ramifications were for Idyllwild, given its
proximity to the Santa Rosa Mountains, Kelly did not hesitate to answer
or to frame an alarming response.
“The implications for Idyllwild are huge,” she said quickly.
“Idyllwild’s pine forest could convert to chaparral.” Accompanying that
conversion is a higher threat of fire or intense fire.
Another UCI graduate student, Aaron Flowers, has done research
elsewhere in California. He found that substituting younger and smaller
pines for larger and older pines in a given area ultimately reduces its
carbon capture ability.
Larger trees are more efficient and effective at collecting carbon than
the younger and smaller trees or saplings, according to Flowers. A tree
36 inches in diameter can capture as much carbon as 60 trees only 4 to
12 inches in diameter. Flowers warns about the loss of too many large
trees.
“The large trees are dying from bark beetle and still suffering from
lack of water,” Flowers noted. “Smaller trees might suffer more losses
from a forest bed fire.”
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