KQED's Climate Watch » plants

Life After Wildfire: Studying How Plants Bounce Back

Rachael Myrow — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:00:41 +0000

After a fire at a California state park, volunteers used satellite imagery to study the recovery

Henry Coe Park in Santa Clara County is big: 87,000 acres of former ranch land, dotted with oak trees, meadows that burst with wildflowers each spring, and vast stretches of chaparral. Given that Coe is nestled near Silicon Valley, it makes sense that the retirees who volunteer here bring a certain technical bent to their appreciation of the place.

Case in point: the Lick Fire of September 2007 (Craig Miller reported on it for The California Report). Named the Lick Fire after it was first spotted from the nearby Lick Observatory, the wildfire burned 47,760 acres in the Mt. Hamilton Range by the time it was contained, eight days later.

Since then, citizen scientists who volunteer for the park have been paying close attention to see how the burned land bounces back. In particular: Bob Patrie, a former project manager in Silicon Valley, and Winslow Briggs, Director Emeritus at Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Plant Biology. Together, they’ve pored over satellite imagery to document the impact of the fire on various plant communities in Coe Park.

They used data from the Landsat 5 satellite (before it failed last November). There have been seven Landsats, each designed to provide overlapping coverage of nearly the entire surface of the earth on a regular basis.

Patrie and Briggs zeroed in on a technique for determining the severity of wildfires known as Normalized Burn Ratio, or NBR.

Patrie explains that the chlorophyll in growing plants soaks up red and blue light to maintain photosynthesis, but reflects infrared light to keep from overheating. “This pattern of reflectance is unique to growing green plants. Thus the difference in reflectivity between near-infrared and visible red light from any particular patch of land (NIR-RED) is strongly correlated to the level of photosynthesis from that same patch.”

Patrie and Briggs decided to study four plant communities:

Mixed chaparral
Gray pine oak woodland
Mixed oak woodland
Ponderosa woodland

“These communities are not mono cultures, nor was the burn intensity uniform over each area,” Patrie says. Just so, they found something interesting: plant life bouncing back after a fire, “tops off” at the same point as before the fire. “You can see that there’s an intrinsic limitation to the amount of any given plant in any given territory,” says Patrie. “It’s true in each kind of ecosystem.”

What they haven’t been able to answer is why bulb flowers “just went crazy” after the fire. Briggs says “Native Americans knew that. They’d do a burn, then harvest the bulbs, some of which are edible.” But the question remains, “What signals to the bulb to flower? The smell of smoke?”

That’s a question they’re still exploring–and can explore further, now that it’s clear the park will stay open, a story told on The California Report on Monday.

Explore KQED’s entire series, “California’s State Parks: On the Rocks,” at our special coverage page.

Scientists Look for Climate Trends in High Places

Molly Samuel — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:13:10 +0000

Molly Samuel

Scientists gather on Freel Peak to take a census of the plants on the summit.

Mountaintops can be good places to study the effects of climate change because there aren’t any things like factories or highways or garden weeds up there. In that way, they’re more like laboratories.

So, even though it involved a tough hike, about a dozen scientists gathered at the top of Freel Peak near South Lake Tahoe earlier this summer to count every single plant at the summit. It was for GLORIA, short for Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments, a project that sends botanists and plant ecologists to the world’s highest mountains to document the tiny, colorful plants that live on them.

GLORIA surveys are repeated every five years, and this was the second survey on Freel Peak. By tracking the changes here, scientists can gain a better understanding of how alpine regions differ in their responses to climate change, and what the future may hold for lower elevations.

“Because of the nature of the alpine habitat, it is more sensitive to environmental changes,” explained GLORIA coordinator Colin Maher. “It’s kind of a beacon. It’s like a warning sign. We might not know for 20 years what’s happening, but it’s a place where change is more likely to happen and we can detect it.”

Plus, the plants are cool for their own sake. They’re specially adapted to live in tough conditions, and even though they’re tiny, many of them can live for decades. But they may not be here forever, and Maher said, that’s another reason to study them now.

“If the climate warms, they’re on an island, essentially. A shrinking island. And since they can’t move down, they can only go up, and that’s only so far,” he said.

Small Budget, Big Commitment

GLORIA is based in Austria, where it was founded about ten years ago. There is no central funding, and so the tools the scientists use to conduct the surveys are inexpensive: plastic flags, colorful string, school binders. Many of the botanists and ecologists are volunteers.

Connie Millar, a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service, helped bring GLORIA to North America. She got a little choked up talking about the people who come out to help.

“The volunteerism is amazing to me. How people feel committed to it. The excellent botany and the care they give,” she said. “It’s very difficult working on summits. It’s extremely challenging. The commitment is extraordinary.”

Listen to the companion radio piece for this story on The California Report.

The Next Frontier: Artificial Photosynthesis

Lauren Sommer — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:02:28 +0000

The ultimate model for clean fuels? (Photo: KQED QUEST)

Amidst all the fretting over the development of solar and wind technology, it hasn’t been lost on some scientists that there are organisms on the planet that have already cracked the renewable energy code: plants.

Photosynthesis is a highly efficient way of converting sunlight to fuel. So why not try to copy them?

That’s a bet that Energy Secretary Steven Chu is taking. Today, the Department of Energy announced $122 million in funding to create the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a new research hub based in California. The California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab will lead the effort, along with other universities around the state. Their goal will be to create an “integrated solar energy-to-chemical fuel conversion system” and to make it commercially viable.

Artificial photosynthesis isn’t a new idea. Research has gone on for decades in search of the right chemistry to make it happen. But plant mimicry is no easy task. Last year, I visited the lab of Heinz Frei at LBNL, one of the researchers there working on the chemistry. His big breakthrough was developing a chemical catalyst that speeds up the process of using light to break apart water molecules. That’s the same thing that plants do, but they create sugar molecules as a result. The sunlight-to-fuel process would create liquid combustible fuels, like benzene.

Finding a way to make these fuels at scale would be a “transformative breakthrough,” according to the Department of Energy, given our current dependence on oil. DOE is making the bet that even if cars and trucks run on electricity in the future, liquid fuels aren’t going away anytime soon.