Collaboration bursts the ‘science bubble’ to protect dryland forest threatened by climate change (original) (raw)

In eastern California's White Mountains, across a broad arid valley from the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, Ana Bacoch looked out over a pinyon pine and juniper woodland. Kids scrambled into branches while adults harvested sticky green cones from pinyons laden with their biggest crop since 2019.

Later, in Indigenous communities throughout the Owens Valley below, mild and buttery seeds tucked into the cones’ scales would be blessed as part of an annual pine nut celebration, slow-cooked underground, boiled, milled into flour, munched by the handful, or gifted to neighbors.

“The little ones were out there with their grandmas and moms, cousins,” said Bacoch, who had organized the group as part of her work with the Pinyon Community Climate Action (PiCCA) project – a collaboration involving more than two dozen partners from federal agencies, Tribal Nations, non-governmental organizations, the University of California Berkeley, and Stanford University.

Bacoch, a member of the Big Pine Paiute Tribe of the Owens Valley, remembered climbing around the woodlands as a child herself, listening to her mom sing in Paiute while they gathered pine nuts. “I know the mountains and trees like hearing our voices,” she said. “It’s a really great benefit for us when pine nuts come out in such abundance like they have this year. And they haven’t been like that in years.”

Crossroads for a critical resource

Pinyon-juniper woodlands cover more than three million acres of California and some 100 million acres of the western United States, providing habitat to pinyon jays, bobcats, pronghorn, and other species.

Pinyons tend to produce cones in a boom-and-bust pattern, with groves of trees growing huge crops of cones every few years. Among pines, they are an underdog of sorts – not the tallest or the biggest; they don’t have the highest economic value. But these woodlands are an important carbon sink in the arid American West and play a vital role in California’s water supply as part of the watershed around the Owens Valley – a once-lush area siphoned dry to bring water to the city of Los Angeles.

“They’re probably the most drought-resilient dryland forest type in the western United States,” said PiCCA researcher Paul Burow, a postdoctoral scholar in Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability who has brought together many of the group’s collaborators through relationships built over the past 10 years.

In spite of pinyon pine trees’ natural resilience, however, higher temperatures, declining snowpack, insect outbreaks, and massive wildfires exacerbated by climate change have killed millions of pinyon pines in recent years across the American West.

For over a century, many federal management policies and practices valued use of pinyon-juniper woodlands for livestock grazing. More recently, federal land managers have focused on transforming thousands of acres of pinyon and juniper woodlands in the Great Basin region to create better habitat for the near-threatened greater sage grouse.

Tree removals have been more limited in the White Mountains and Great Basin ranges just east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But in response to forest mortality over the last several decades, public land users including agencies and tribes have begun to urge stronger focus on woodland health and resilience to environmental change.

“We’re in this moment where the paradigm is shifting again, and more people are saying these woodlands are ecologically important in and of themselves, and there is a lot of value they provide,” said Burow. “We can’t lose this really critical indigenous food source, this carbon sink, all the different wildlife that use these ecosystems. All of that’s at risk right now, and that’s why people are eager to try things out on the ground – they’ve been seeing all the mortality.”

A collaborative search for solutions

The PiCCA project, which received seed funding in 2023 from the University of California and the state of California, is a locus for this collaborative search for solutions. Principal investigator Miranda Redmond, an associate professor of forest ecology in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department at the University of California, Berkeley, is leading the project’s ecological studies to understand the environmental and genetic factors that drive pinyon nut production. Co-lead Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, is shepherding the effort to elevate social and cultural values in assessments of what’s at stake in decisions about the future of pinyon-juniper forests.

“At the broadest level, the goal is to have meaningful and long-lasting partnerships among the many different groups that value and use these woodlands, and ultimately create more resilient woodlands,” said Redmond, who is constructing a record of historical cone production using field surveys of the scars left on branches by dropped cones. Her team and community groups like those led by Bacoch are conducting related surveys to monitor woodland health and cone production patterns over time. “A big goal is really ramping up Tribal stewardship and agency stewardship, and having a dialogue about what that should look like in the future,” Redmond said.

The community-led research at the core of the pinyon-juniper project is a specialty of Wong-Parodi’s research group at Stanford. Over the past two years, her team has worked with local organizations and residents in the Eastern Sierra region to conduct hundreds of interviews with community members; federal land managers; state agencies; and municipal, county, and Tribal leadership and staff. They have held dozens of focus groups with ranchers, conservationists, and Indigenous community members in the area.

“Developing these relationships and trust is a huge and sometimes underestimated part of community-based work,” said Emma Sage, a researcher in Wong-Parodi’s group at Stanford who manages the day-to-day work of the PiCCA project, from communicating with partner organizations and analyzing data to recruiting and mentoring student workers to spend the summer talking with members of Eastern Sierra communities to understand local perspectives around land use, environmental values, and priorities for stewardship.

“What we bring to the table is our expertise in rigorous social science methodologies,” Wong-Parodi said. “So, collecting the data, coding, analyzing the data, and interpreting the data, and then communicating that – translating the science into terms that are actionable for policymakers.”

A pinyon pine forest nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains, its rugged beauty shaped by dry conditions interspersed with heavy precipitation events. | Andrew Brodhead

Bursting the ‘science bubble’

The two research threads – ecological and social – are deeply intertwined. Bacoch, in her role as tribal pinyon specialist for the project, works to involve community members with scientific surveys of the pinyon pine woodlands. That means figuring out the days and times that fit with work schedules, kids’ soccer games, and powwow season commitments. Other barriers are more personal. “People hear ‘surveys’ and ‘data collection,’ and that kind of makes them wary. But once they learn it – it’s hands-on collection, it’s out in the mountains – they like it. They come back, tell their friends or family,” Bacoch said.

Disparate groups have come together in common cause through the field surveys and PiCCA project, whose partners include the Bishop Paiute Tribe, Big Pine Paiute Tribe, Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, Bridgeport Indian Colony, Eastern Sierra Land Trust, Friends of the Inyo, and Sierra Business Council. “It brings us all out there, where normally we wouldn’t be out there in the mountains – different tribes and departments,” Bacoch said. “Everyone has the same passion or hopes of helping the trees, documenting what sites are healthy or unhealthy. It gets the conversation going of what can be done about it.”

The surveys themselves were developed in collaboration with the Bishop Paiute Tribe and U.S. Bureau of Land Management to identify vulnerable and declining woodland areas. It was through conversations with members of Indigenous communities in the Great Basin area that the project team came to focus on how people value not only the pinyon and juniper forests, but the landscape as a whole.

Redmond recalled one meeting where an environmental manager with the Bishop Paiute Tribe suggested looking more closely at the pine nuts themselves, and how stewardship activities might affect taste. It’s common, Redmond said, for scholars to do “research in a science bubble, and then disseminate it.” Co-developing research, she added, “helps us avoid missing key things, and make sure we’re producing information that is of value to the people that it’s intended to serve.”

Far from hindering implementation, all of this convening, listening, and relationship building may in fact accelerate the translation of knowledge into action, the researchers said. “Something we’re hearing from communities is let’s get some work out on the ground. The trees are dying, climate change is already here – it’s been happening for a while. Let’s not spend years just talking to each other,” Burow said. “That actually is very compatible with doing cutting-edge scientific research, because you can demonstrate and study different types of collaboration and stewardship, and then you see what happens.”

Toward community-based stewardship

In the face of growing demand and costs for prescribed burns, forest thinning, and other measures to mitigate wildfire risk, a new approach to shared stewardship has begun to emerge. “Federal agencies will partner with other entities. It could be a state or local government, it could be tribes,” Burow said. The state of California has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into federal forest management through these partnerships.

This marks important progress toward shared stewardship, Burow said. But work remains to understand how to do it well, particularly in the context of Tribal nations that have a government-to-government relationship with U.S. agencies and unique political histories. “I think the next phase is about scaling up community-based stewardship on federal lands, where agencies are partnering with tribes and NGOs and local governments to do projects out on the land in a collaborative framework,” he said.

Yarrow Syskine, a researcher in forest ecologist Miranda Redmond’s group at UC Berkeley, demonstrates the art of Pinyon seed collection, showcasing how researchers can determine what years have produced large numbers of cones over the past decade. | Andrew Brodhead

Ripple effects for community and forest health

Insights from this work could eventually help uncover ways to make sure pinyon-juniper woodlands continue providing value to people and wildlife in the face of climate change. For example, depending on community input, one strategy to test would be what scientists call assisted migration: In areas where changing climate conditions threaten ecologically or culturally important woodland species, this would mean planting seeds or young trees from vulnerable species in areas where they’re more likely to thrive as the world warms.

“We’re still learning about the genetics of pinyon pine, but in general, trees can be locally adapted to climate conditions that they historically experienced,” Redmond said. “Genetically distinct populations that are adapted to hotter, drier areas may be more resistant to drought.” Redmond’s team at Berkeley is now growing pinyon pines from seeds collected across the state to understand their genetic diversity and traits that may help buffer pinyons against impacts from climate change.

For Burow, the next phase is about trying to understand possible ripple effects for community well-being and forest health when local people are deeply involved with monitoring and stewarding woodlands. “We need solutions that are going to benefit ecosystems and people,” he said.

In the trips she leads to the mountains, Bacoch has already caught glimpses of that future. “My hope is that with our tribe starting to get out there with the surveys, that this will continue to grow, and our community will have a bigger interest in it,” Bacoch said. She envisions organizing a group to go out and clean up dead tree limbs and trash, to create “a spot where we go and gather and camp out and have a presence out there as a whole group. Having us up there will spark something in someone else, an idea of a better way to move forward for overall community health.”