Klamath Network Parks, Fall–Winter 2024: Bat Disease, Fire Science and Monitoring

The Klamath Inventory and Monitoring Network gathers long-term science for six national parks in southern Oregon and northern California: Crater Lake, Lassen Volcanic, Lava Beds, Oregon Caves, Redwood and Whiskeytown. Highlights from its fall–winter 2024 newsletter, the Klamath Kaleidoscope:

White-nose syndrome moves into California

White-nose syndrome is caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd). It invades the skin of hibernating bats, damaging their wings and often leaving white fuzz on their faces. Sick bats wake more often during hibernation, burning through their energy stores and starving, or leave hibernation too early, when food and water are too scarce. Since it arrived in North America in 2006, it has devastated bats in the east, with no effective treatment yet — a serious loss, since bats pollinate crops such as agave, spread seeds of fruits like figs, and eat insect pests.

• The spread: first found in Humboldt County, Pd is now confirmed in five California counties, including Sutter, Placer, Amador and Inyo, with low-level detections in several more. Going by other states, the disease could appear in California's bats within a few years.
• Surveillance: network crews, led by Dr. Alice Chung-MacCoubrey with Bat Conservation International biologist Dylan Rhea-Fournier as field lead, capture and swab bats each spring, just out of hibernation, when Pd should still be detectable.
• Finding winter roosts: little is known about where western bats hibernate. Each fall, the crew radio-tags bats to follow them, refining its methods as it goes:
• • Night telemetry — listening at dusk as bats leave their roosts and at dawn as they return, to narrow the daytime search.
  • Pop-up stations — the crew's receiver towers log signals around the clock but are heavy, so it designed lightweight stations that can be backpacked where there are no roads.
  • Official Motus tags — in 2024 the crew switched to tags picked up by the growing Motus network of towers, built for tracking long-distance migratory birds, so bats can be detected far beyond the study area.

Top: a pop-up telemetry station at Red Butte, Lava Beds National Monument. Bottom: Dylan Rhea-Fournier listens for bat radio tags from Little Mount Hoffman in the Modoc National Forest. NPS photos.

The clues point to possible roosts — one in the blocky rocks of a lava flow, where a motion-detector camera, set to catch bats, caught a ring-tailed cat instead.

A ring-tailed cat at a possible bat roost in a lava flow, Modoc National Forest. NPS photo.

More on experimental treatments from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a Southern Oregon University intern's account of a spring with the bat crew.

Data on demand as a fire approached

In late July 2024, California's Park Fire surged toward Lassen Volcanic's southwestern boundary. Park managers urgently asked network ecologist Lauren Youngblood where the park's most valuable whitebark pine stands were. In two days, she used the network's 12-year monitoring record to map the healthiest stands — the least blister rust and the most cone-bearing trees — and flagged trees that may resist blister rust. The fire stopped just outside the park, but the maps were ready to help fire planners decide what to protect and how to contain it.

Whitebark pine plots in Lassen Volcanic: cone-bearing trees and blister rust infection. NPS map by Lauren Youngblood.

What Lassen's fires teach

Western wildfires have burned more land, more often and more severely since the mid-1980s, and some forests may not come back as forest — losing wildlife habitat, water quality and carbon storage. Fire ecologist Dani Niziolek, formerly a network data scientist, has published two studies from Lassen:

• Forests recover — given time. Seedling counts from areas burned by eight fires between 1984 and 2012 showed regrowth was likelier within 1–2 football fields of live forest and as years passed — but slow recovery leaves young forest exposed to reburning. Climate mattered less to how many seedlings returned than to which species. Regrowth was common at most plots, and the researchers concluded that California's montane forests are resilient to prescribed fire and managed wildfire. Read the study.
• Suppression plus past burns. The 2021 Dixie Fire — California's largest single fire to date, at 374,000 ha — was studied to see how earlier fires and firefighting tactics changed its severity in Lassen. Tactics ranged from offensive backfiring (burning ahead of the fire in normal weather, well before it arrives) to riskier, last-minute defensive backfiring in extreme weather, plus fuel breaks and retardant. Defensive firing carried less risk than expected, and matching tactics to fire history gave the best chance of reducing severity. The authors call for more training in large-fire tactics. Read the study.

Prescribed burning lowers fuel loads and future fire severity; intentional fire can also backburn ahead of a wildfire. NPS photo.

People

• New: Trent Berrian, permanent vegetation monitoring crew lead; Amelia Weiss, cave scientist (through the Great Basin Institute) for Lava Beds and Oregon Caves since August 2024; and Philip Tanimoto, GIS specialist since September 2024, employed by Whiskeytown and serving the whole network.
• Regional help: Dani Niziolek, now a Pacific West Region data scientist, helps parks document, manage and make better use of their research datasets; Erik Meyer, a Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division biologist, helps parks measure and reduce noise and light pollution — from baseline sound and sky-quality data to air tour and overflight management.
• Former intern Kira Ware, a bat and vegetation technician in 2022, now leads the U.S. Forest Service's northern spotted owl bioacoustic monitoring in southern Oregon, and credits the internship — and Chung-MacCoubrey's mentorship — with the confidence and skills behind her career.

The Milky Way over Lassen Peak. NPS photo by Allison Taggart-Barone.

The 2024 field season

• Caves: 102 bats counted in winter hibernation surveys — slightly fewer than 109 the year before, but still part of an upward trend over 15 years. Ice surveys were completed in all 5 ice caves, with a faster, more accurate method piloted in 4 of them.
• Birds: a banding station caught 257 birds of 28 species; Oregon junco, Nashville warbler and MacGillivray's warbler made up 50% of captures. Surveys covered all 25 planned point-count routes in one park, but half the routes in another were lost to data loss and will be repeated in 2025.
• Whitebark pine: all 10 sites surveyed.
• Streams: the Park Fire pushed the Lassen stream crew to Crater Lake, where two technicians sampled 18 of 30 reaches; elsewhere, 10 of 24 reaches were sampled in the 5th cycle.
• Redwood: the 7th year of the rocky intertidal biodiversity protocol and the 20th of targeted species monitoring; 21 of 26 upland and 17 of 21 streamside vegetation plots, with logging and road removal blocking the rest.

Also: the network finished the last of six vital sign overviews, Checking Redwood's Vital Signs; new natural history articles on the common garter snake, the Yuma myotis and the California spotted owl; and past issues of the newsletter.

A California spotted owl "in questioning mood," Yosemite National Park, 1934. Photo by Joseph Dixon, public domain.

Sources

Based on "The Klamath Kaleidoscope: Fall-Winter 2024," prepared by Sonya Daw, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; an intern's article and a former intern's remarks are paraphrased, and rewritten in hubnx's own words. Staff portraits and photographs credited only by name are not reproduced.