Short Wave - The Race To Rescue The Guadalupe Fescue

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Big Bend National Park in Texas is home to the only remaining Guadalupe fescue in the United States. The grass is tucked away in the Chisos Mountains, high above the Chihuahuan Desert. These mountaintops form a string of relatively wet, cool oases called "sky islands" — unique, isolated habitats. But as the planet warms, species that depend on "sky island" habitats tend to get pushed even higher up the mountain — until they eventually run out. Carolyn Whiting, Park Botanist at Big Bend, talks to host Aaron Scott about why the little things are worth preserving. Check out all the other episodes in our series on the research happening in U.S. public lands.We're on Twitter now! Tweet us @NPRShortWave. We also happily accept emails at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hi, my name is Blaise Loebner. I'm nine years old. I'm at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR News. Big Ben National Park sits on the U.S.-Mexico border in West Texas. You know, where the state dips south then bends back up before turning down again, following the big bending curve of the Rio Grande. So we have a river as our southern border.

This is Carolyn Whiting. In the middle of the park, we also have a... a small mountain range called the Chisos Mountains. But most of the park is what we would call a lowland desert. And it's just all sorts of cacti and shrubs with small leaves and real expansive desert habitat. These different ecosystems, mountains, water, and desert, they're why people often say Big Bend is three parks and one. Carolyn says the idea of spending her life exploring this massive diverse landscape.

learning its secrets and its moods, it was irresistible to her from the moment she set foot in the park. She was a grad student there on a trip-lebe of the park botanist Joe Saratnik. And that particular day was really stunning. There was a thunderstorm moving across the sky in the distance. And I just thought, gosh, Joe is the luckiest guy on earth that he gets to come out here every day. And this is his job to look after these plants in this really special place. and I immediately tried to, you know, elbow my way into the car with him so that I could ask him, hey, how do I get a job like yours?

I waited five years before they ran the job. And when they ran it, I dropped everything and applied because this was the dream job, and I'm so glad to be here. Today, being there is the park botanist involves traveling from her home in the middle of the park up into the Chesos Mountains. These mountains rise from the desert floor, creating cooler, rainier, isolated ecosystems known as Sky Islands. So it's able to support forests, real trees, oaks, conifers,

and it's named because the area around it, the lowland desert, doesn't support any of that. And so it really acts as an island because it's so separated from any other place that's got similar types of forest ecosystems. And there's something living up there that we are wanting to talk to you about today. Please introduce us to the Guadalupe Fescue. Yes, the Guadalupe Fescue is a grass that grows in this Sky Island in the Chesos Mountains. It previously was known from Guadalupe Mountains, which is further north from here, but that

population hasn't been seen since 1952. So here in Big Ben is the last place in the United States that you can find this grass And it's only known from a very small area, maybe less than a mile from one end to the other. It's occluded near the top of these mountains, the Guadalupe Fescu is endangered. And Carolyn, as the park botanist, has come to care deeply about these humble little tufts. If you don't know much about grass identification, it looks a lot like all the other grasses up there, to be frank. But it's really special because it's specialized to this Sky Island ecosystem. That remote ecosystem is what's protected these last patches of endangered grass,

but it's also what makes them vulnerable to climate change, drought, and fire. So today on the show, we head to Big Bend National Park to look at Guadalupe Fescue and the race to learn more about it before it disappears from the United States. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcasts from MPR. This summer we've been road-tripping through national parks and other public lands to learn about the science happening there. In Big Bend National Park, among its ecological nooks and crannies, there's one canyon that is now the only place in the U.S. where Guadalupe Fescue is known to grow. It's quite a trip to get up to where the Guadalupe Fescu lives,

and it's about a half-day hike up, and it's a lot of switchbacks, a lot of climbing elevation along the way. Park Service staff have been making the trek for decades. They started monitoring the Fescue in the early 90s, long before it was listed as an endangered species. This was in conjunction with Texas Parks and Wildlife Division, especially Jackie Poole, who was really instrumental in finding those first plants and marking out where they live. And I mean, that's a lot of work and not something that I feel like anyone undertakes lightly. Why did they begin monitoring the fescue to begin with? Oh, that's a great question. So Jackie really wrecked. recognized that this was a truly rare plant that isn't found in many other places. And I think

she was interested in making sure that we don't lose it. So she set up monitoring plots to be revisited every year, these same permanent locations where you would count the number of fescue in this plot. It's because of these plots located in the densest growths of the fescue that the federal government decided to list the Guadalupe Fescu as endangered in 2017. For years, those plots provided a trove of information for scientists. When it flowers, when it seeds, how long do plants live before they die? But it wasn't able to tell us how many plants are in the population because the plots were set up where plants were already very dense. So it wasn't a very unbiased sample of the entire

population. To wrap their heads around exactly how in danger the fescue was, researchers needed to get a sense of just how many were left. That's where Carolyn came in during her PhD research at the University of Texas at Austin. We set up plots that were evenly spaced across the entire area that we thought was potential habitat for the fescue. And we visited nearly 50 of them in the first year in 2019. And we got a pretty good estimate of the population size. We found that. We found that, there were probably around 1,800 fescue in that population. And we found new fescue that people didn't know about in new locations by using this unbiased sampling method. What does the surveying look like? I mean, what is it involved? How grueling of some field research are we talking about?

Well, I think there's sort of like the sense of pride among field researchers is that they could do anything. There's nothing too difficult. But I have no pride. And I'm not ashamed to admit that It is very difficult. It's very difficult to haul four days worth of food and camping supplies up the mountain and then work long days doing the plot visits and counting the fescue. But it was worth it to monitor and conserve this unique slice of Texas flora. Then in April 2021, while Carolyn's back in Austin, she hears that a fire is broken out in the Chisos Mountains right where the fescue make their home. At first, it didn't actually seem like a big deal. We all thought this was a best-case scenario at the time because the fire was not at the hottest part of the summer. There had been some recent rains, so the fuels were not completely dried out.

Firefighters hiked into the remote area soon after early reports of the fire. They were able to reach the site before nightfall and got to work containing the blaze. From what we were hearing, the fire was staying relatively on the surface. level. It wasn't climbing into the canopies of the trees, which can be much more destructive kind of fire. So I feel like this is what fire ecologist called good fire. Like it's, it's kind of cleaning things and rejuvenating the habitat. Exactly. And this area really needed it. Prior studies have estimated that fire should happen maybe every 25 years, and it had been 80 years since the last fire. So there was a huge amount of fallen trees that were just sort of decaying and wood.

so much fuel that could have made for a really, really severe fire. She would have to wait two months for the area to reopen so that she and her colleagues could check in on the fescue. After completing two surveys, first as a grad student and then second as a freshly minted park botanist, Carolyn was surprised and a little unsettled by the results. Nearly 60% of the population was lost after the fire. Oh, wow. We don't know whether that was actually due to the fire itself. or at the same time, it was a pretty dry year.

So those drought conditions might have also been the cause of the death. Or maybe it was a combination of both the dry conditions and the fire made for very stressful experience for the fescue. And that's what killed them. Before the fire, researchers had suspected that what the fescue needed was fire, that a mild fire like this one would actually clear the ground so the fescue could get more light and flourish. So it was really surprising when we met back in 2021 and found a lot of the fescue were missing. We're kind of back to the beginning and trying to figure out what's going to happen with this species. So even after all these years of monitoring,

there's still so much they don't know. And they're running out of time because another looming threat, climate change, may have particularly acute ramifications for isolated ecosystems like the sky islands. Climate change is potentially going to be affecting the fescue because as the climate warms species to maintain the same temperament.

habitat that they're used to, they need to move it to a higher elevation. And the problem with the fescue is that it's already pretty close to the top of the mountain. It's going to quickly run out a mountain if climate change causes a very high increase in the temperatures. Because their plants can't move further north from the equator, north can they move further up the mountain? Like this is kind of the last best spot for these species to exist. Yes, exactly. That's that extra challenge of being in the Sky Island. It's just desert to the north, unless you travel miles and miles, which Fescue can't easily do. There are efforts beyond the Park Service to conserve Guadalupe Fescue. One group hopes to raise seedlings outside the park and then plant them in their little Sky Island home in the Chisos Mountains. To increase the population size and also to learn a little bit more about the Fescue's habitat requirements. But it's, but it's,

It's a challenge. We are finding that the fescue is pretty fussy in where it likes to grow, and we're having trouble raising the fescue outside of the park. And the story of the efforts to save the Guadalupe Fescue. First by Jackie, that Texas Parks and Wildlife Staffer who, walking around, realized the plant was rare. And then by wider park staff who joined in to help monitor the plant before any official requirement to do so. That whole story sticks with Carolyn. It collected data for decades, and then that finally got them to the point where they were able to have the species listed and get that higher level of protection that's afforded under the Endangered Species Act. And I use that as sort of a template in the back of my mind that if there are species out there that need more protection, we can collect data about them because we can't determine if a species is endangered if we don't have the data to support it. For me, Carolyn's story of the Guadalupe Fescue

makes me wonder about all the things we're not watching. The things we're losing to fire, drought, and climate change without even knowing it, without even knowing to look for it. It's a reminder that the world is big, but the little things matter too. The nuances are what give a place character and identity, and our decisions have weight. This episode is part of our series about the science happening on public lands.

We'll drop a link to those stories in our episode notes so you can check out the entire series. Rebecca Ramirez produced this episode and Gabriel Spitzer edited it. Rebecca Britt Hansen and Giselle Grayson teamed up for the fact check. Natasha Branch with the audio engineer. Giselle Grayson is our senior supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grumman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm your host, Aaron Scott. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, The Daily Science Podcast.

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