Saving Whitebark Pine: How National Parks Teamed Up for a Threatened Keystone Tree

Whitebark pines on Mount Washburn, Yellowstone National Park. NPS / Diane Renkin

It gets less attention than giant sequoias, but the slow-growing, long-lived whitebark pine is the sentinel of the western high country. It grows at high elevations, mostly on public land — national forests and national parks — from the southern Sierra Nevada into Canada and east to the Rockies. It's a keystone species: whole ecosystems depend on it to stabilize soil, support biodiversity, and feed and shelter wildlife.

A tree in trouble

The tree is also slow to recover: it takes 25 to 50 years just to produce cones.

Fifteen national park units together hold more than a million acres of whitebark pine habitat. The road to protection was long:

A team across parks

Parks long worked on the tree alone or in small regional groups. In 2017 they formed the NPS Five Needle Pines Team — at first to streamline talks with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over listing. Managing one plant across so many parks proved so useful that the team grew, spanning the tree's range from Yosemite through Olympic and Glacier to Grand Teton, and later adding parks with other five-needle pines facing the same threats.

Beth Fallon of Mount Rainier National Park called the team "a great community to learn from," whose research helps her park plan for whitebark in wildland fire planning and in consultations with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Jacob Edwards, a forester at Lassen Volcanic National Park — home to whitebark, western white and sugar pine — said voices from around the country bring "unique perspectives and unique solutions."

A whitebark pine at Panhandle Gap, Mount Rainier National Park. NPS

Backing the "best of the best"

With land agencies and tribal nations, the team helped write the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan and identify core areas — stands with the best odds of long-term survival — chosen on stand condition, location, contribution to the species' resilience, and how feasible restoration would be. The aim: core areas holding 20–30% of the whitebark pine in each unit.

In those areas, managers are collecting and planting genetically proven rust-resistant seed and seedlings, building on decades of research at the U.S. Forest Service's Dorena Genetic Resource Center. Protecting the trees that produce rust-resistant seed is central to the species' future.

Cages protect cones from animals until they mature; then workers harvest the seeds to grow seedlings. NPS

The nutcracker's role

The tree depends on the Clark's nutcracker, a bird related to crows, to spread its seeds. But nutcrackers eat many pines' seeds, and they'll abandon whitebark stands that produce too few. The plan's core goal is healthy stands producing enough cones to keep the birds coming — so they carry rust-resistant seed beyond the core areas, as they have for thousands of years.

A Clark's nutcracker with a pine seed at Craters of the Moon. NPS

New tools, new money

• The NPS Inventory and Monitoring Division, Climate Change Response Program and partners — including the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, American Forests, the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative and the Arbor Day Foundation — are building park-specific climate models. Used in the NPS Resist-Accept-Direct framework for rapid, irreversible change, they help parks make realistic choices; machine learning and remote sensing can speed the search for restoration sites.
• When the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act passed, the team was ready: nine western parks received more than $2 million to find rust-resistant trees and core areas, collect and plant seed and seedlings, and monitor the results — building on 20 years of work.

Beyond park boundaries

Slow growth, the loss of cone-bearing trees and blister rust mean the tree can only be saved at the landscape scale. Working across boundaries lets land managers share data, pool funding, coordinate restoration, handle wildland fire and spot new threats together.

Sources

Based on Sarah Haas, Stefanie Wacker and Kristin Legg (NPS Five Needle Pines Team), "How a Tree Created a Pivotal New Conservation Community," Park Science, Summer 2024, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.