The National Park Service's Klamath Inventory and Monitoring Network, based at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, tracks the "vital signs" of six parks. Its Fall–Winter 2023 newsletter, The Klamath Kaleidoscope, covered the items below.
Mountain pine beetle hindered from entering a boring hole in this whitebark pine. NPS.
Image from the National Park Service's Fall–Winter 2023 issue of The Klamath Kaleidoscope.
Whitebark pine listed as threatened
On January 17, 2023, whitebark pine became a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The listing brings specific protections and a formal recovery plan, then in development, and should boost federal and conservation funding for restoration — such as finding, growing and planting trees genetically resistant to white pine blister rust, the species' main threat. It also draws attention to the causes of decline: blister rust, outbreaks of native mountain pine beetles, changing fire regimes and a changing climate.
Whitebark pine on the rim at Crater Lake National Park. NPS/Jen Hooke.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Late 1990s | Crater Lake National Park begins monitoring whitebark pine |
| 2003 | Crater Lake starts its blister rust resistance program |
| 2005 | The network picks whitebark pine as one of 10 vital signs from 172 candidates — its only single-species sign |
| 2023 | Crews finish their fourth cycle of plot visits at Crater Lake and Lassen Volcanic, after 12 years of visiting each plot every three years |
Why whitebark pine made the cut:
- it's a keystone species: wildlife eat its seeds, other plants take root more easily beneath it in the harsh subalpine zone, and its shade slows snowmelt so streams run longer into summer;
- blister rust and other threats made its loss increasingly likely;
- visitors love its twisted, gnarled shape on mountaintop vistas;
- it is easy to monitor, fits with other networks' five-needle pine programs, and Crater Lake's program offered a model.
The network's counts of seedlings and cone-bearing trees, and of damage from blister rust and beetles, helped justify the listing by documenting, along with other studies, the species' widespread decline. With the network's vegetation map of Crater Lake, the data are also helping pick "core restoration" areas for the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan, organized by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. The network works with the Sierra Nevada, Upper Columbia Basin and Mojave Desert networks, which also monitor five-needle pines. Former network vegetation ecologist Sean Smith takes hope from the fact that trees surviving now are the likeliest to be genetically resistant — natural selection at work.
The Dixie Fire and Lassen's lakes
By Eric Dinger
The 2021 Dixie Fire, one of California's largest fires on record at the time, burned through almost 75% of the ponds and lakes the network monitors in Lassen Volcanic National Park. Crews had sampled them in 2013, 2016 and 2019, and added an extra round in 2022.
A small pond in Lassen Volcanic National Park burned in the 2021 Dixie Fire. NPS.
| Measure | Burned lakes | Unburned lakes |
|---|---|---|
| Average change in chloride | Up 0.23 mg/L | Down 0.03 mg/L |
| Variety of zooplankton species | Slightly, but not significantly, higher | — |
Zooplankton collected from the lake center with a plankton net at Silver Lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park. The red color is from astaxanthin, a pigment hypothesized to have multiple benefits for zooplankton survival NPS.
The chloride change is unlikely to affect lake life, but chloride is part of a lake's dissolved salts, and shifts can signal changes in the surrounding watershed. Zooplankton showed no apparent effect a year after the fire. Open questions include delayed effects, what burned shoreline plants and new snags will mean, and how amphibians will respond. Lakes were sampled again in 2023 and will be revisited every three years.
Top: chloride rose in burned ponds and lakes a year after the Dixie Fire. Bottom: zooplankton variety was slightly, not significantly, higher in burned waters. NPS/Dinger.
Bats on stage
As white-nose syndrome — a nonnative fungal disease devastating North American bats — spreads through the West, scientists are swabbing bats, searching for winter roosts and writing protocols to keep people from carrying the fungus between caves. Outreach matters too. On August 11, 2023, 75 visitors came to a bat evening at Lassen Volcanic. Bat crew lead Dylan Rhea-Fournier explained bat biology and conservation, he and Dani Niziolek showed how a backpack detector picks up bat calls, and network scientists Alice Chung-MacCoubrey and Nekai Eversole, with Nicole Rose of the Northwest Bat Hub at Oregon State University and other scientists, showed visitors two bats caught that night at Reflection Pond.
Nicole Rose of the Northwest Bat Hub shows young visitors a live bat; everyone wore masks to avoid passing COVID-19 to the bat. NPS/Niziolek.
| Visitor question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What do bats eat? | Mostly moths, beetles and other night-flying invertebrates |
| How long can the white-nose fungus last on clothes? | It depends, but the cold-loving Pseudogymnoascus destructans can survive for years in the cold |
| How soon can a pup fly? | Full size in 2–4 weeks, then another 2–4 weeks to learn to echolocate and fly — 4–6 weeks in all |
| Does a mother fly carrying her young? | She usually has one pup, which clings to her only briefly after birth, if at all |
| Where to report a bat colony or sick bat? | The state wildlife agency |
People
- Jacqueline (Jackie) Lucero, interim vegetation monitoring lead, got the vegetation crew through bad weather, road closures and power outages and met every sampling goal. The network remembers her kindness too: huckleberry pancakes for the crew, and a three-hour detour to fetch a sleeping bag a crew member had forgotten.
- Daniel Chambers, a Southern Oregon University intern on the 2022 lakes crew, arrived with little science background and learned water-quality probes, zooplankton and macroinvertebrate sampling and more. He went on to become a fisheries technician with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, restoring Yellowstone cutthroat trout in the Bighorn Mountains.
Jackie Lucero, right, collecting vegetation data with field staff. NPS/Niziolek.
Jackie Lucero, far left, with Klamath Network staff and field crewmembers. NPS.
2023 monitoring
| Park | Results |
|---|---|
| Crater Lake | 5 of 6 ponds (one dry); all 20 alpine, 20 riparian and 26 upland vegetation sites; all 10 whitebark pine sites |
| Lava Beds | Winter bat counts ~10% higher than the year before; only 2 of 5 ice caves surveyed, for lack of staff; all 25 bird routes |
| Lassen Volcanic | 22 of 31 lake and pond sites (road damage); all 10 whitebark pine sites |
| Oregon Caves | Record winter bat count: 109; bird banding caught 262 birds of 30 species (June 1–October 13), including an uncommon California quail and black-throated gray warbler; all 10 vegetation sites |
| Redwood | Freshwater Lagoon sampled; 15 bird routes (12 planned, 3 extra); rocky intertidal: 6th year of biodiversity monitoring, 19th of targeted species |
| All parks, incl. Whiskeytown | Invasive plants surveyed on all priority roads, trails and boundaries |
On September 21, 2023, aquatic ecologist Eric Dinger briefed Crater Lake staff on stream (2021) and lake (2019) results. New publications covered rocky intertidal monitoring at Redwood and seed-availability models for conifer regrowth after the 2018 Carr Fire.
Sources
Based on "The Klamath Kaleidoscope: Fall-Winter 2023," Klamath Inventory and Monitoring Network, National Park Service, prepared by Sonya Daw; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.
- The film and any audio are the National Park Service's own files, from the source page.
In these publicationsCrater Lake National ParkLassen Volcanic National ParkRedwood National and State ParksLava Beds National MonumentWhiskeytown National Recreation AreaOregon Caves National Monument & Preserve
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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