Important Research Results From Sagehen

Important Research Results from UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station

Sagehen has a long history of research that reflects back and strongly informs land management policy. Here are a few examples, along with selected bibliographic references.

1. Ground and surface water modeling. Drawing conclusions about natural processes is impossible without long-term datasets. With over 60 years of accumulated meteorology and stream data, Sagehen possesses one of the longest running datasets in the country. The associated Sierra Snow Laboratory has the longest snow pack dataset in the western US. With every passing year, this data grows more useful and valuable across disciplines and geography, making it easier to ask questions and get answers.

One of Sagehen’s major research focus areas with this data is closing the water cycle by learning more about what happens to water when it goes into the ground. This is not well understood.

According to Doug Boyle, professor at University of Nevada and the Nevada State Climatologist, the USGS GSFLOW software is “probably the most important hydrologic product to ever come out of Sagehen. The model is very popular internationally and Sagehen was the only example used throughout the document - unfortunately most of those guys have never been to Sagehen.”

Reference:

USGS GSFLOW software Markstrom, S.L., Niswonger, R.G., Regan, R.S., Prudic, D.E., and Barlow, P.M., 2008, GSFLOW-Coupled Ground-water and Surface-water FLOW model based on the integration of the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) and the Modular Ground-Water Flow Model (MODFLOW-2005): U.S. Geological Survey Techniques and Methods 6-D1, 240 p. http://water.usgs.gov/nrp/gwsoftware/gsflow/gsflow.html

2. SPLATs. The northern Sierra Nevada was largely denuded of timber during the Comstock silver strike in Virginia City, and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The forest that re-grew was optimized for timber harvest, which now shows limited diversity of tree species, size and age class, as well as a massive build up of fuel due to a century of active, aggressive fire suppression.

This is not a healthy structure for a forest nor for the things that live in the forest: large fuel loads along with high susceptibility to drought, insect infestation and disease result in devastatingly hot and destructive wild fires and declining wildlife habitat quality. Unfortunately, much of the forested western US suffers from the same conditions. Due to a warming, drying climate since their establishment after the last ice age, forests cannot always recover or reestablish after these disruptive events.

At this point in time, the forests need active manipulation to return them to a more natural, resilient structure, but this is too expensive to do everywhere. A strategy for treating a smaller portion of the forest that yields similar benefits was proposed and adopted by the Forest Service in the early 2000’s. The strategy was called SPLATs, Strategically Placed Land Area Treatments. The idea involves thinning and removing fuel from roughly 30% of forested areas in a waffle-like pattern. This approach shifts the choice of treatment zones from smaller, more targeted and logistically or politically motivated areas, to a broader “landscape” management perspective.

But SPLATs had never been tested on a real forest, nor in areas with topographic relief. In partnership with the Forest Service, Berkeley professors Scott Stephens and John Battles decided to implement the strategy at Sagehen. They funded a Ph.D. student and a massive data collection effort. Creating what is one of the best data sets of its kind, the study sampled the entire basin for vegetation and fuels, including a grid of permanent 500-m plots where every tree is tagged and measured, canopy closure determined, and all ground fuels classified. LiDAR laser mapping created high-resolution topographic maps at 1-m resolution, for both vegetated and bare-earth surfaces. A solid fire history dating back to the 1800’s was drawn from live trees and Comstock-era stumps.

Existing fire models were enhanced with this data and new predictive tools created. In this process, it became obvious that while these treatments would definitely disrupt fire behavior, their implementation would potentially impact wildlife, water and other forest products. To fill in the missing pieces, the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) put together an interdisciplinary team to come up with a guiding document: a science synthesis on the broader natural ecology of east-side pine forests. The result, General Technical Report (GTR) 220, provided a big picture view of the issue and how to structure forests that are not just fire-resistant, but also topographically diverse, wildlife friendly and responsive to today’s--and tomorrow’s--altered climate conditions.

With this tool in hand, Sagehen worked with the Forest Service to create a collaborative process to decide what to do in the basin forest, where, and how to do it. We invited everyone who might be interested: loggers, environmentalists, agency staff, academics, NGOs, interested citizens. And they came. We hired a facilitator. We created a public outreach blog (http://sagehenforest.blogspot.com/) and posted every document the group created. We treated two demo plots so everyone could see the ideas on the ground rather than just in the abstract. The group spent over a year hammering out the best solution.

And, amazingly, everyone was able to agree, potentially offering other forests a way around the logjam of litigation that has shut down virtually every timber cut proposed on public lands in the western US in recent years.

In addition to the vast forest structure inventory, the Sagehen Forest Project is creating momentum to revisit past research and answer larger questions. In anticipation of the coming changes to the landscape, hydrology and soils data collection is expanding. And researchers are actively re-sampling historic small mammal trapping transects, bird surveys, and pine marten monitoring. Protected Activity Centers (PACs) set aside for species of concern like Northern Goshawks and California Spotted Owls are being watched carefully to see if the animals really do prefer the current conditions, or if they will move when different local habitat becomes available. Reference:

Vaillant, N.M., Sagehen Experimental Forest Past, Present, and Future: An Evaluation of the Fireshed Assessment Process. 2008, UCB. p. 172-172.

3. Early trout research. Sagehen was originally founded for fisheries and wildlife research. A big part of what we know about wild Brook trout today comes out of work by Sagehen Director Paul “Doc” Needham and his graduate students in the 1950’s, who include the iconic trout expert and writer, Bob Behnke. Says Behnke, “This [work] did demonstrate that a wild trout population in good habitat could sustain a satisfactory fishery for those seeking wild [Brook] trout.”

Needham was convinced of the value of wild fisheries very early on and talked California Fish and Game into ceasing the stocking of hatchery trout into Sagehen Creek, creating one of the first wild non-native trout fisheries in the state. Today, the practice has spread widely and sportsmen highly prize these wild fisheries.

Demonstrating the power of being embedded in an environment long enough to notice the unexpected, Forest Service management policy for ephemeral streams changed agency-wide when Sagehen researchers serendipitously discovered large Rainbow Trout spawning in tiny seasonal tributaries.

Needham was also the first to recognize that the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout of adjacent Independence Lake was the last self-reproducing native and genetically pure population of this species. A seminal Masters thesis by Needham’s student Robert N. Lea is referred to as “the Bible” by the current lead researcher, Gary Scoppetone.

The attention brought by Needham and his students led to protections for the fishery that continue today, including the elimination of non-native stocking, property purchase by The Nature Conservancy, and an active USGS recovery program for the Threatened and Endangered Lahontans, and the lake’s six other native fishes, a rare full natural complement. As Ray Butler of the Nevada County Fish and Wildlife Commission says, “Bottom line here is that Sagehen has inspired a cadre of fishery biologists that are active today in teaching, management, and consulting.”

References:

Lea, R.N., Ecology of the Lahontan cutthroat trout, Salmo clarki henshawi, in Independence Lake, California. 1968, UCB. p. 95-95.

Erman, D. C. and V. M. Hawthorne. The quantitative importance of an intermittent stream in the spawning of rainbow trout. 1976. T. Am. Fish. Soc. 105(6):675-681.

Deciding which Sagehen publications are the most significant is a surprisingly difficult exercise. For sixty years here, scientists have been collecting facts like little butterflies. Seldom, if ever, has anyone attempted to decipher their impact and pin them into a cohesive narrative. We can discuss the meaning of any specific study, but the meaning of the bigger picture? That’s harder. What is the significance of all this work? How does the entire watershed function, not just its pieces? Upon the creation of the Sagehen Experimental Forest in 2005, we were thrilled and thought the value of this designation, which shifted management focus to research from multiple-use, was self-evident. So, we were floored when we heard a local say that “it seems kind of elitist”. Clearly, our message was not getting out. What, really, is our message? How do we communicate with populations outside the scientific and local communities? Why should they care about this work?

Finally addressing these questions is what’s so exciting about…

4. The 50 year art project. Helen and Newton Harrison are internationally renowned environmental artists with gallery representation in New York City. Their work attempts to present scientifically sound solutions to environmental issues. Past projects include a national land-use planning strategy that was adopted by the Netherlands, and the invention of living roofs for a meadow restoration in Germany. The University of California at Santa Cruz created the Center for the Study of Force Majeure to study the Harrison’s body of work.

The Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno recently hired the Harrisons to produce a 50 year art project addressing climate change in mountainous areas. Sagehen will function as the outdoor exhibit for this project, with additional sister sites in the Alps, Himalayas and Andes. The concept is to create a series of frames around areas being altered as part of the Sagehen Forest Project and a parallel research effort associated with the art project, then to manipulate the vegetation within these plots to attempt to counter effects of climate change to increase water yield.

In addition to the museum support, the artwork has attracted $250K in development funding, making it, already, one of the largest projects in Sagehen’s history.

Reference:

The Force Majeure document from the Harrison Studio and the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure, UC Santa Cruz, California. 2012, Helen and Newton Harrison.

By Faerthen Felix & Jeff Brown, Sagehen Creek Field Station managers Dec 19, 2012