GLORIA at Great Basin National Park: Watching Alpine Plants for Climate Change

Written from an article by Meagan Oldfather, Jan Nachlinger and Brian Smithers, organizers of GLORIA Great Basin, in The Midden (Great Basin National Park), Vol. 19, No. 1, Summer 2019.

GLORIA — the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments — is a worldwide network that surveys alpine summits with a shared method, to track how alpine species shift as the climate changes. It spans more than 100 alpine areas.

The Great Basin network

The non-profit GLORIA Great Basin leads the work at eight areas in eastern California and Nevada. With Great Basin National Park, it runs the surveys and data in the southern Snake Range, at the heart of the Great Basin — a contrast to its western-edge sites in the White Mountains, Sweetwater Mountains and around Dunderberg Peak.

• The peaks: Buck Mountain, Bald Mountain, Pyramid Peak and Wheeler Peak, set up in 2008 and resurveyed in 2013 and 2018.
• The range: from Buck Mountain at 3,347 m, where trees give way to alpine tundra, to the shoulder of Wheeler Peak at 3,981 m, with similar local climates and rock.
• The work: teams lay out plots and botanists record every plant species in them.

What grows up there

The flora is somewhat less rich than at the western sites, with many species in common — but at least fourteen species grow here and at none of the other seven GLORIA Great Basin areas.

Rocky Mountain plants — eight taxa with Rocky Mountain rather than Sierra Nevada affinities:

• on Buck Mountain, two Rocky Mountain conifers, dwarf juniper (Juniperus communis var. depressa) and tree-line Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii), and Franciscan bluebells (Mertensia franciscana), apparently found in Nevada only in the Snake Range;
• five showy alpine plants: alpine avens (Geum rossii var. turbinatum), sticky sky pilot (Polemonium viscosum), Parry primrose (Primula parryi), moss pink (Silene acaulis), and the uncommon largeflower fleabane (Erigeron grandiflorus), known in Nevada only from the Snake Range.

Eastern Great Basin rarities:

• Wheeler sandwort (Eremogone congesta var. wheelerensis) and smoothleaf beardtongue (Penstemon leiophyllus var. francisci-pennellii), found only in a few high ranges of eastern Nevada;
• Holmgren cinquefoil (Potentilla holmgrenii), in two eastern Nevada ranges and one neighboring range in western Utah.

Found nowhere else — three perennials endemic to the Snake Range's high elevations, and so to the park: Snake Range whitlowcress (Draba serpentina), Holmgren wild buckwheat (Eriogonum holmgrenii) and Charlet cinquefoil (Potentilla hookeriana var. charletii). They are vulnerable: there is very little alpine ground for them, and it's unknown how they'll fare as other species move upslope with warming or drying.

What the data may show

Alpine plants are early indicators of climate change: high elevations warm faster and their plant communities change more. Many studies, including GLORIA work elsewhere, find species richness rising with warming — likely as lower-elevation species move up while true alpine species are only slowly crowded out. But in water-limited alpine systems, like the park's dry peaks, that trend may be muted or even reversed. The team has yet to analyze changes over time here and hopes to report soon.

Thanks

The surveys were first set up by GLORIA coordinator Ann Dennis with Gretchen Baker and Meg Horner of the NPS. Independent botanist Glenn Clifton has joined every survey, and his flora of the South Snake Range has been invaluable. The park has contributed staff time, logistics and equipment. Volunteers interested in the surveys can reach GLORIA Great Basin through its website.

Sources

Based on "GLORIA 2019 Update," by Meagan Oldfather, Jan Nachlinger and Brian Smithers, published by the National Park Service in The Midden and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. It cites Bertrand and others (2011), Clifton (2012), Lamprecht and others (2018), Pauli and others (2012), Pepin and others (2015) and Steinbauer and others (2018). The photographs, credited to individuals, are left out.