Peak plant life part of alpine study in Glacier

In the high windy peaks of Glacier National Park, a team of researchers has been quietly keeping an eye on the plants.

Up there conditions are harsh. The wind howls. It rains. It snows. It's tough to be a plant. These plants live long and low to the ground, clinging to marginal soil and rock.

They're some of the toughest -- and yet most delicate -- plants on the planet.

For all of those reasons, alpine plants like Luzuli piperi (piper's woodthrush) or Erigeron lanatus (woolly fleabane) are good bellwethers for climate change, notes U.S. Geological Survey researcher Lyndsey Bengtson.

Bengtson and a team of Glacier Park botanists are part of a worldwide scientific effort called the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments, also known as GLORIA.

GLORIA started in Vienna, Austria, in 1996. Glacier was the first site in North America to join the effort. Scientists at the time knew they could monitor climate change, in part, by monitoring plants on mountain summits.

Why summits? The reasons are many and varied, scientists note, but some are practical -- mountain summits are easy to find, so relocating plots is fairly easy. In addition, all aspects of a summit generally remain unchanged, unlike other areas of an alpine environment, where shading from trees or impacts from avalanches or landslides, for example, could change the plant communities.

In Glacier, researchers are currently monitoring plant populations on four east-side mountains in the park -- Pitamakan, Seward, Bison and Dancing Lady.

During the surveys botanists record everything from plant diversity to species makeup and frequency. They also take readings at the plots -- many alpine plants are sensitive to soil temperature changes, for example.

The plots are laid out in 1-meter square grids and the method is fairly simple -- identify the plant species inside the grid. Scientists first did surveys in the hot, dry summer of 2003. They resurveyed plots in 2009.

Bengtson said it's too early to tell at this point if the plant communities in summit environments are changing due to global climate change or natural variation -- mountains, even at their summits, are in motion, and some plots have seen soil changes over the years. Sites also get trampled by humans and animals.

But there have been some preliminary trends, she noted. Overall, the number of plant species on the summit plots has increased.

The mountains are getting greener. But not all species have done well. Some species that existed on the summits in 2003, such as the piper's woodthrush, are no longer on some summits.

Bengtson cautioned the data is incomplete;  researchers need to monitor plots longer and would also like to examine them more frequently than every five years.

In addition, researchers will also look at temperature variations on the slopes. Bengtson said there are inexpensive temperature-monitoring devices that researchers bury in the soil.

The monitors automatically record the temperature every hour for an entire year. She said researchers will likely put some of those on the peaks this summer.