How a “gateway reserve” serves as a research hub & expands scientific horizons beyond NRS boundaries
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[ The NRS Transect 26:01 (Spring/Summer 2008]
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The UC Natural Reserve System encompasses roughly 135,000 acres at 36 sites across California. That’s a minute fraction of the land controlled by major land-management agencies throughout the state. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), for example, manages 15.2 million acres in the state, the USDA Forest Service has 20.1 million acres, and California State Parks oversees 1.4 million acres. Nevertheless, the impact of the NRS is far greater than its acreage suggests, for many NRS reserves serve as research hubs and portals that offer scientists access to much larger geographic areas, while also providing land-management agencies with the information they need to make science-based management decisions.
The Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserve (VESR), for example, consists of two sites totaling about 200 acres, yet researchers and students based there conduct projects throughout hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands in the southern Sierra Nevada. Discoveries resulting from such investigations can have influence well beyond reserve boundaries. As an example, the findings of one Valentine-based researcher, Roland Knapp, led the USDA Forest Service to change its policy on stocking non-native fish in High Sierra lakes to protect rapidly declining populations of mountain yellow-legged frogs.
The 9,000-acre Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center is another great example. Though the 9,000-acre reserve encompasses just 0.06 percent of the 1.6 million-acre Mojave National Preserve, 75 percent of the scientific research projects in the eastern Mojave are directly affiliated with Sweeney Granite Mountains. According to Granites Director Jim André, the reserve has a single focus: “Basic science is our primary research role. The government agencies tend to prioritize applied research that supports pre-defined management issues, like the impact of exotic vegetation on fire regimes. But it’s a mistake to leave out the basic science component. I always remind people that SONAR came out of basic research into bat echolocation, but it played an important role in winning World War II. The same is true today.”
The eastern Mojave was long considered a void for academic research. The 1980 Global 2000 Report to the President(1) described the region as one of North America’s “black holes” in terms of research and inventory of biodiversity. Little was known about the vast, largely unpopulated area, and little concerted effort was being made to explore it. This situation began to change in 1978 when the UC Regents established the Granites Mountains Reserve, as the NRS site was then called. Over the years, the number of research projects based at the reserve grew steadily; over the last five to ten years, the pace of research there has accelerated dramatically. Currently, more than 135 active research projects are based at Sweeney Granite Mountains, about 20 of which are designed to run longer than 25 years. “The eastern Mojave Desert is unique compared to much of California, in that it’s still a frontier for taxonomic discovery out here,” André explains. “Every year, several new plant or invertebrate species are found, and the results are published and reported to the agencies. The field station is the focus for a number of floristic inventory programs and taxonomic work that regularly results in the identification of new species. Given that we are still at the stage of basic inventory, imagine how untapped is our understanding of the biology and ecology of these organisms.”
The NRS as a gateway is an analogy that works in both directions. State and federal agencies benefit from the basic research that emanates from NRS sites, while university researchers often make important contacts with agency decision-makers. “A reserve is part of the regional landscape,” says André. “The agencies are aware of us and have learned to rely on us, so we can open doors for scientists to participate in broader programs of agency research.”
The access and support provided by reserves often play a crucial role in fostering nascent careers. Eric McDonald is a perfect example. Today McDonald is a research professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, and one of the world’s leading desert geomorphologists. But when he first came to Sweeney Granite Mountains in 1990, McDonald was a new graduate student at the University of New Mexico looking for a research project. His advisor, Steve Wells, had been studying late Quaternary Period (1.8 million years ago to present) climate events recorded in the Sima Volcanic Field and Soda Mountains near the Granites, and he asked his student to “take a look at the next range over.”
“I spent a lot of my research time in Granite Cove,” McDonald recalls. “That’s when Philippe Cohen was director.(2) It was pretty primitive, and there weren’t many users, but it was good, because I had a place where I could keep my gear locked up and there was fresh water. That definitely made it much more convenient than camping out every night and going into town for ice every three days.”
Cohen’s contributions ranged from basic — making sure the young geologist, who was working by himself without benefit of radio or cell phone, made it back from the field every night — to the more complex task of helping McDonald negotiate the permit process at the Bureau of Land Management. McDonald had assumed that no one would care if he dug a few soil pits in the empty desert, but he soon learned that his entire research site was a proposed wilderness study area. “We had to get permits from BLM’s Needles office,” McDonald explains, “and the fact that they knew Philippe and that the reserve was out there really helped move things along. It still took a long time, but at least there was a known person they were dealing with, instead of somebody out of the blue.”
Much has changed over the years. With the formation of the Mojave National Preserve in 1994, the National Park Service (NPS) replaced the BLM as the area’s administering authority. At first, many scientists had the impression that the Park Service was less than supportive of research. Over the last couple of years, however, their perception has changed. The Preserve now has a science advisor, Debra Hughson, who links scientists with the park’s management and mission. McDonald gives a lot of credit for this turnaround to Jim André and his colleague Rob Fulton, the reserve manager at CSU Northridge’s Desert Studies Center at nearby Zzyzx. As he explains it: “They’ve both had a strong input on the Park Service in terms of facilitating scientists working out there. The Park Service has people on site keeping an eye on what kind of research is going on, and people have formed strong working relationships. That’s been a real positive step. I’ve been at multiple meetings with Jim, Rob, and Debra. They definitely have regular communications, and that can only be a good thing for scientists.”
Exploring a Landscape Shaped by Catastrophe
When McDonald began investigating the Granite Mountains and adjacent Providence Mountains, he was interested in how the properties of desert soils, and their formation, vary as a function of age, source materials, and sand in-migration. The Providence Mountains turned out to be a perfect laboratory for his study, because there were four different sequences of soils along the mountain front. In turn, each sequence was formed from quartz monsonite, mixed plutonic (medium- to coarse-grain granite rocks), mixed volcanic, and limestone. Each of these sequences was very different in terms of source materials, soil chemistry, and particle size. And each had been deposited in a large alluvial fan that stretched out from the base of the range.
“Each sequence was deposited during a discrete time interval,” McDonald explains, “and was probably related to climate change. So this means that, as you walk along the mountain front, you can separate out discrete periods of sand deposition. You can separate them using soils, or you can separate them using surface topography or desert pavements. You can think about this as almost a staircase, where each level up represents an older surface. Geomorphologists assume that the older surfaces at one time looked like the younger surfaces as far as the soils that formed them. So this gives us a framework to see how soils change over time.”
McDonald was also able to link each of these formations to late Quaternary and late Pleistocene climatic trends, and it soon became clear that the dramatic landscape could not be completely explained by current weather patterns. Much more calamitous events had to have taken place in order to account for the myriad of dry lake beds, eolian sand dunes, bajadas, and alluvial fans that spread across the landscape. This is why he refers to the Mojave as “a landscape of catastrophe.”
Alluvial fans are of particular interest to McDonald, especially the impact of big storms on soil formation and sediment transport out of the mountains onto the piedmont. If climate change in the Mojave originally created these fans, what will happen if, as predicted, climate change alters future storm frequencies and temperature trends? Will it have equally dramatic effects on soil, vegetation, and sediment transport?
“We’ve spent a lot of money over the last 15 years developing models for climate change,” says McDonald. “We know that the climate has changed a lot in the past and that it will change in the future, but our knowledge of how the landscape is going to respond to that climate change is still very sketchy, especially in the deserts.”
Working with the “Plant Guys”
Over time, McDonald realized that the Granites had become more than a place to store his gear. It was also a place to share ideas with other scientists. In fact, one set of conversations he had there led him to a whole new line of research as he teamed up with two plant ecologists, Joe McAuliffe and Erik Hamerlynck, to investigate the relationship between plant cover and soil types.
For these investigations, McDonald mapped the area’s soils and hydrology, while his colleagues recorded the plant community structure and physiological response. Their collaboration, one of the first multidisciplinary studies in the area, has produced excellent results. “We soon realized that you can start predicting plant cover if you know something about the soil composition,” says McDonald. “Part of the idea is that we can explain the plant community structure as a function of the soil processes. Or, more correctly, though the biologists don’t want to hear this, we can see how the soils control the plants.”
One of the group’s findings was that there are basically two types of deserts: those with old, well-developed soils and those with young, weakly developed soils. Young soils differ dramatically from older soils in terms of hydrology, water infiltration, depth of water movement in the soil, size of the plants, and structure of the plant community. “Basically,” McDonald says, “it has a lot to do with how much water goes into the soil and how deeply it penetrates.”
This insight has proven valuable for land managers throughout the Mojave. One of those managers, the U.S. Army, was struggling to restore its heavily damaged desert training sites. Decades of tank maneuvers and troop movements had destroyed the fragile desert soils in many places and led to major sandstorms. When the army became aware of the work McDonald and his colleagues were doing in the Providence Mountains, it asked them to consult on restoration work at Fort Irwin National Training Center. By analyzing the soils, plants, and hydrology in the damaged areas, these scientists have been able to help the army develop new ways to quantify soil degradation, choose appropriate plant species for restorations, design more effective irrigation techniques where required, and develop methods of restoring damaged soils, a very difficult process.
These restoration projects have led to another set of projects designed to help the army improve its desert operations and training by developing an understanding of how desert surfaces, landforms, and soils affect troop mobility. As soldiers in the Middle East have learned, sandstorms are by far one of the biggest hazards in terms of both the health of military personnel and wear and tear on equipment. The scientists are helping the army predict what areas are prone to sandstorms so they can be avoided whenever possible.
Cross-country travel in a desert landscape can also be challenging. From a distance, these landscapes usually look very smooth; in reality, they are often strewn with boulders, cobbles, washes, and other impediments. McDonald is working with the army to develop techniques to help soldiers better predict what soil conditions they are likely to encounter at different desert locations. “One of the things we’re trying to do,” he explains, “is to develop soil maps on the fly, based on satellite imagery. We understand how landscapes form, so we should be able to look at a landscape and quickly develop soil-terrain maps that could be used to predict a wide range of soil properties. Basically, they’d tell us, ‘Go here, but don’t go there.’”
This process represents almost a complete reversal of the work McDonald was doing in the Providence Range. That research taught him how specific desert soils and formations evolved. Now he’s generalizing that knowledge to look at formations in the middle of an unknown desert and predict how they formed, what soils they contain, and what impact they could have on military operations. “We’re taking the same basic research that we did in the eastern Mojave and applying it to this new area,” says McDonald. “That’s the way science works. You get a toehold somewhere, and then you keep working with it in new ways. Someone once told me that you have to work in an area for about five years before you really get to know it and can ask good questions. That’s really true. I look at my state of knowledge now and compare it to what I knew in 1990 when I first walked out there, and it’s just amazing. When I go out there today, I have this knowledge base in terms of the history of the area, what’s known, and what’s not known. Over time, it gives you a real foundation to keep advancing the science.”
McDonald is constantly on the go these days, with multiple research projects scattered around the globe. But, whenever time permits, he returns to the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center. He has a graduate student investigating the hydrology of the limestone alluvial fans in the Providence Range, and it’s a good place to catch up with his research colleagues. “Everybody is so busy, it’s getting harder and harder to spend time in the field working with each other. Erik, Joe, and I actually spent two or three days there recently working on manuscripts and proposal ideas. So we use it as a place to get away from the office and do some thinking.”
For an area once considered a scientific “black hole,” the eastern Mojave today is the focus of much research. It might still be the Wild West in terms of yet-to-be-discovered plant species, but as far as historical understanding of the landscape goes, it’s become quite well known. McDonald’s work is just part of this effort. “Mine is one of many projects that have been done out there,” he notes. “If you include the work that was done at the Sima Volcanic Field, Silver Playa, and Soda Playa ... taken together, that’s a fairly solid contribution in terms of understanding late Quaternary geologic events and today’s landforms. Between salt flows, playas, alluvial fans, and sand dunes, it’s a real extensive record. Collectively, that whole area is probably [now] one of the most intensively studied desert landscapes in the world in terms of soil and geomorphic processes.” —JB
For more information on conducting research at Sweeney Granite Mountains, contact:
Jim André, Reserve Director
Sweeney Granite Mountains
Desert Research Center
HC1 Box 101
Kelso, CA 92351-0101
Phone: 760-733-4222
Email: granites@telis.org
For more information on the work of Research Professor Eric McDonald at the Desert Research Institute, Reno, go to:
http://www.dri.edu/People/emcdonal <http://www.dri.edu/People/emcdonal>
Footnotes
(1) The 1980 Global 2000 Report to the President was commissioned by U.S. President Jimmy Carter on May 23, 1977, and released in 1981 by the Council on Environmental Quality. It sold over 1.5 million copies in eight languages. Drawing from computer models to make projections for the future based on trends for the 1960s and 1970s, the Global 2000 Report was the first and only report by any national government on the economic, demographic, resource, and environmental future of the world (ISBN 0-08-024616-8, ISBN 0-08-024617-6).
(2) Philippe Cohen and his spouse, Cindy Stead, managed the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center from August 22, 1986, through October 16, 1993. He now directs Stanford University’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve: <http://jrbp.stanford.edu/>.
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