The Plateau Postcard, Winter 2024: Bats, Dying Pinyons and a Career at Valles Caldera

This issue's postcard, from Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico. NPS.

About the newsletter

The Plateau Postcard is the newsletter of the Southern Colorado Plateau Network (SCPN), one of 32 National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring networks, which gather and analyze natural-resource data on the parks and turn it into forms resource managers can use. SCPN covers 19 park units across northern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado and southern Utah — and above all, it says, it is a community of people who love the Colorado Plateau. (Printable version.)

Greetings, and farewells

Program manager Matthew Johnson opened 2024 with two retirements. Bob Parmenter is interviewed below. And Kristen Philbrook, wildlife biologist for Park Service Regions 6–8, retired after 30 years of service.

• Raised in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, she studied at Hope College and took a master's degree at Northern Arizona University.
• She started as a seasonal technician for the Bureau of Land Management and Colorado Parks & Wildlife, then spent 25 years with the U.S. Forest Service.
• She joined the Park Service in 2018, covering 85 parks from Montana to the Mexican border. She worked with every SCPN park and visited 25, mostly in New Mexico and Arizona, and helped many parks fund priority research on the Emerging Wildlife Disease review panel.
• Her favorite park? She wouldn't say — though her first was Grand Teton.

Bats and white-nose syndrome

In October, staff met at the Chaco-Aztec Museum and Archives Facility in Albuquerque to plan a multi-park bat project newly funded by the Park Service's Emerging Wildlife Disease Program — with thanks to museum curator Cynthia Wiley and archivist Brenna Lissoway for hosting and showing off the collection.

A spotted bat at Mesa Verde National Park. NPS.

White-nose syndrome is one of the worst wildlife diseases of modern times. It has killed millions of bats across North America and is spreading fast toward the region (where it is now). In the coming work, 20 parks will mist-net bats to watch for the disease across the Colorado Plateau, and use acoustic monitoring to record which bats live where, and when, before or as the disease arrives.

Plateau perspective: the issue's scenic shot was Horseshoe Bend in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, where the Colorado River has carved a bend roughly 1,000 feet (305 m) deep and 270º around — seen, unusually, under snow.

Can satellites see a die-off coming?

SCPN is working with four parks that have lost pinyon-juniper woodland to test whether signs of a die-off show up in satellite imagery months or years ahead. Trees should be stressed long before a long drought kills them, and even sudden die-offs may be foreshadowed by signs of vulnerability.

• The problem: death shows as a sharp break in the yearly growth record, but slow decline in these evergreen woodlands is subtle. And in sparse western conifer stands, the satellite indices usually used to track plant condition respond more to sun angle and shadow than to photosynthesis. So managers get no advance warning.
• The plan: SCPN landscape ecologist Jodi Norris and USGS remote-sensing scientist Jessica Walker are looking for a replacement index for pinyon-juniper country, one sensitive to the stress that comes before events like the four parks' die-offs.
• The goal: weekly vegetation-condition maps across the network's pinyon-juniper woodlands, flagging the areas most at risk.

Spot the difference: automated Phenocam photos taken six years apart — 2017 and 2023 — in Grand Canyon National Park's pinyon-juniper woodland. Five trees have died outright, and a few others show stress. NPS.

Bob Parmenter: twenty years at Valles Caldera

Bob Parmenter, chief of science and resource stewardship at Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, talked to Christopher Calvo in fall 2023 before retiring.

Bob Parmenter. NPS.

From La Garita Summit over Valles Caldera National Preserve. C. Daily/NPS.

• Roots: growing up in then-rural northern Virginia in the 1950s–60s, before the Beltway, he hiked and camped in Shenandoah National Park and caught frogs, snakes and turtles to keep for a while and release. His mother, born at a mission in the Belgian Congo in 1925, was a kindred spirit. Mentors followed: high-school biology teacher Mrs. Abell; ecologist Richard Beidleman at Colorado College; Whit Gibbons and Gene Odum at the University of Georgia; and his Ph.D. adviser at Utah State University, Jim MacMahon, with whom he still publishes.
• The defining event: the 2011 Las Conchas Fire, which burned 156,000 acres, about 30,000 of them in the Preserve. Expecting more such fires as the climate warms, staff and outside researchers set up long-term monitoring of vegetation, wildlife, soils, streams, fish and aquatic invertebrates, comparing burned and unburned plots across forest, grassland, wetland and streamside habitats. Those plots are still sampled.
• What he found in 2003 — a landscape that looked pristine enough for Congress to buy it in 2000, but with five big problems:
• 1. forests clear-cut mostly in 1963–1972, regrown as dense "dog-hair thickets" loaded with fuel;
  2. grassland valleys overgrazed by sheep and cattle for perhaps 200 years, damaging creeks and wetlands;
  3. nearly a thousand miles of logging roads — around 6 miles of road per square mile — causing erosion;
  4. 185 stock tanks cutting upland catchments off from the watersheds below;
  5. 77 miles of sheep and cattle fence, cutting the land into dozens of pastures and trapping wildlife.
• Progress: forest thinning nearly done, at about 10,000 acres; about 80% of wetland and stream restoration finished by partners including Los Amigos de Valles Caldera, Rio Grande Return, Rio Puerco Alliance, Keystone Restoration Ecology and WildEarth Guardians; and all 77 miles of fence gone. Roads and stock tanks remain.
• Change he has seen: at his bird feeder, white-winged doves — a southern species — have replaced mourning doves, likely with warming. At the Preserve, staff returned native species: several hundred Rio Grande suckers and Rio Grande chubs to the San Antonio Creek watershed in 2007, and the northern leopard frog to the Jemez Mountains in 2013. Both are thriving.
• Teamwork: know your role on each project — sometimes quarterback, sometimes ball carrier, sometimes blocker — and adapt.
• The future: ecological responses to climate change will lead, and genetics and evolution under a changing climate may grow in importance; genetic engineering could reshape both human ecology and nature.
• Who fixes things: since private industry caused most current environmental problems, he says, fixing them falls to individuals, communities and government — and industry, properly regulated and guided, can be part of the solution.
• Advice: think big and long-term, embrace teamwork, and take constructive criticism.
• Next: he's signing on as a Park Service volunteer to keep analyzing data, writing papers and leading field trips — "everything except the administrative functions."

Valle Grande, Valles Caldera National Preserve. NPS.

Better scientists after every hitch

Collecting data in the field. NPS.

A hitch is biologist slang for a stint of fieldwork — eight days for the upland vegetation and soils crew. SCPN plant ecologist Megan Swan and data specialist Cindy Parker built a tool to improve the crew's data during the season by tracking observer error — the overestimated grass cover or misidentified plant that creeps into almost every dataset.

• Swan says facing imperfect accuracy is uncomfortable for someone whose job is collecting data, but knowing the variation between observers helps interpret the results — so she began feeding it back to the crew in near real time.
• Whether it improves accuracy is still to be seen, but reviewing data as it arrives, rather than after the season, makes her feel closer to the fieldwork — and every dataset has observer error, so better to face it.
• Crew leader Hannah Andrascik says the crew liked it, if a little nervously: it connects them to their data, and adds accountability, since everyone can see everyone's numbers.

How errors happen: Artemisia carruthii (left) and Artemisia dracunculus (right) — now imagine them as seedlings. Max Licher, CC BY-SA.

Also in this issue

• Report: Upland vegetation and soils at Chaco Culture, Petrified Forest and Wupatki, 2007–2021.
• Data: aquatic macroinvertebrates and upland vegetation and soils.
• The network's 2024 field schedule for water quality, aquatic invertebrates, groundwater, upland vegetation and soils, and birds.

Sources

Based on "The Plateau Postcard: Winter 2024," written and designed by Christopher Calvo, Southern Colorado Plateau Inventory and Monitoring Network, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The Artemisia photograph is Max Licher's, under CC BY-SA. A photograph of Horseshoe Bend credited by name only, a meeting photograph and a montage of park photographs are not reproduced.