Exploring the complexities of Glacier

The extraordinarily diverse research opportunities available in the Northern Rockies were on display recently during the second annual Waterton-Glacier science and history conference.

More than 100 people attended the daylong event at Lake McDonald Lodge on Aug. 18.

The conference featured short presentations on a number of different research projects taking place in the Northern Rockies. Topics ranged from the role of avalanches in shaping the landscape to the competing concepts of "wilderness" that were evident during the early history of Glacier National Park.

University of Montana biologist Richard Hutto offered one of the day's more spirited talks, giving an impassioned lecture about the biological importance of burned forests.

Hutto, director of the university's Avian Science Center, has been studying the effects of burned areas on bird populations for almost two decades.

When people see a fire-ravaged landscape, they typically think it's been destroyed, Hutto said. However, one of the long-term consequences of fire is that it creates a forest mosaic - a random, large-scale mix of tree ages and vegetation types that provides critical habitat for flora and fauna alike.

"Fire is the single most important disturbance agent in the Northern Rockies," he said. "So much of the [habitat] variety we see is the product of fire. If we're interested in maintaining that variety, we have to be interested in maintaining the disturbance process that created it."

Since 1988, Hutto and his students have analyzed about 60 different burned areas, trying to determine the "biological significance" of forest fires.

The measuring stick they used to answer this question was birds. Researchers compared the number of birds and variety of species seen or heard in burned areas versus other habitat types.

"We've detected well over a hundred species of birds in burned forests, and more than half nest there," Hutto said. "These areas are not biological deserts."

Even some common species, such as robins, are much more abundant in burned areas than in any other habitat type, he said. Other species, such as black-backed woodpeckers, are "relatively restricted to burned forests."

Hutto showed the audience photos of a white ptarmigan hidden against a snowfield and of a nearly invisible black-backed woodpecker perched on a blackened tree stump.

"Is the black-backed woodpecker any less impressive?" he asked. "It's telling us that the environment in which it lives is a fire environment."

Three-toed woodpeckers, a close relative of the black-backed, "are three times more abundant in burn areas than anywhere else," Hutto said. Other woodpecker species are more abundant as well.

"In winter, they'll fly around in big flocks," he said. "It's incredible. The importance of these burned forests to over-wintering woodpeckers" is a fruitful research opportunity that hasn't even been touched.

The importance of fire extends well beyond birds to the plants, trees, insects and animals that inhabit these areas, he said.

"Birds are just scratching the surface," Hutto said. "The trees may have been waiting 150 years for a fire to come along so they can have reproductive success. We're lucky we live in an area with a lot of fires. It's the most special, biologically unique habitat there is."

Avalanches are another landscape-shaping process that's common in the Northern Rockies.

"There are about 10,000 avalanches every year in Glacier National Park," said Blase Reardon with the U.S. Geological Survey, in his talk on climate change and avalanche prediction.

Natural avalanches affect most of the steep slopes in the park, Reardon said. They transport tons of debris from the alpine zones down to lakes and streams, affecting the riparian zone.

"They also contribute mass to the park's glaciers, which may help them persist," he said. "For example, Grinnell Glacier is one of the lowest glaciers in the park, and it's fed by a lot of snow coming off the surrounding cliffs."

Much of the landscape that people see as they travel through the park is the result "of a complex interaction between wildfires, avalanches and climate," Reardon said.

Complexity was a common theme for several of the conference speakers. With innumerable short- and long-term variables at play, it's often difficult for scientists to determine the exact contribution any single variable makes to landscape or ecological change.

That's one reason why multiple lines of research are so critical.

Greg Pederson with the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, for example, is using tree rings to infer what the annual snowpack was like here over the last several hundreds of years.

That evidence is then being correlated with other physical evidence, such as measurements of old moraines, to learn more about the complex relationship between glacial retreat and climate change.

The interplay between surface water and groundwater can be equally complex, as Mark Lorang with the Flathead Lake Biological Station discussed during his presentation on the evolving "habitat mosaic" along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River in the Nyack floodplain.

"Since 1945, this river has been all over the floodplain," Lorang said. "Some areas are connected to the annual flood flows; other areas are connected to groundwater flows. It's created a dynamic, diverse habitat: I think every plant in Glacier National Park except for three or four has been found there."

Scientists previously believed that groundwater and surface waters were distinct systems, he said, but research in Northwest Montana has helped change that impression.

"There are upwelling zones where an exchange of water takes place from the groundwater to the surface," Lorang said. "These zones tend to be very productive. For example, bull trout prefer to spawn in these areas. The results of this [Nyack flood-plain] study are changing how people view river systems."

As its name implied, the conference also offered some historical and cultural presentations, including William Farr's discussion of wilderness concepts.

At the time that Glacier National Park was created, in 1910, park officials "embraced the notion of 'wilderness' as a pristine, unmarked and uninhabited landscape," said Farr, a historian with the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. "This was a newer idea of wilderness, in which people were thought of as a threat."

However, park promoter and Great Northern Railway founder James J. Hill "decided that wasn't the idea of wilderness that would benefit him," he said.

Hill preferred an older idea of wilderness, Farr said, one in which Native Americans and cowboys roamed across the frontier.

The Blackfeet Indians were caught between these competing ideas.

Park officials "tried to minimize the Native American presence in the park," he said, by prohibiting Blackfeet Indians from using the region and changing historical landmark names.

Hill, on the other hand, "decided the Blackfeet must be inseparable with Glacier Park. He began promoting them and using them to promote the park to people who were interested in frontier America," Farr said.

As with the other conference speakers, Farr had too little time to do his subject justice. His talk offered but a brief glimpse of the depth of the topic - as happens on most visits to the park.

On the Web:

University of Montana's Avian Science Center - www.avianscience.org

Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center - http://nrmsc.usgs.gov

Flathead Lake Biological Station - www.umt.edu/