Restoration | The Great Summit
Description
Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park: https://schoodicinstitute.org/
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Episode 1_FINAL TRANSCRIPT
Catherine Devine 00:05 Hi, everyone, welcome back to Sea to Trees. This episode opens with a little story about one of the best walks I've ever been on. Let me set the scene. It was late winter in the high desert, which means it was around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I was about to head down one of those secret paths not advertised to tourists. As these things tend to go, it was my friend's father who lives in the area, who told me about this secret spot. Though, to be honest, I'm not so sure how secret it was considering I found some more detailed instructions online. As the instructions said, I followed the path until I saw a small gently worn trail off to the right. I turned right down the skinny path and followed it. It got narrower and narrower until it opened up to the most serene looking bunch of natural hot springs I've ever seen. It was so cool. Spa-like private, and the insider nature of it all give me a small rush of adrenaline. And the best part was that it was secret. A discovery off the beaten path, an adventure. It's the best, right? Well, it's actually kind of the worst. And I wouldn't have done it if I knew the gravity of my actions. That off the beaten path I took. It's pretty harmful. It's called the social trail. And you've probably made one too. You're listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast that tells the stories of the science happening in and around Acadia National Park. From the rocky shoreline to the evergreen forests to the granite mountain tops. The second season of the show seeks to answer the question, what does it mean to conserve in the face of climate change? Social trails, unlike official trails, these users created paths form over time cutting through protected habitat. Once the vegetation is worn down, it starts to look like an official trail, which invites more foot traffic, and the cycle continues. They've become managerial nuisances for national parks all across the country, including Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine, a place that's been experiencing the effects of an especially brutal cocktail of both social trails and more frequent heavy rain events.
Chris Nadeau 02:34 All the mountain summits in the Northeast are absolutely amazing places because of that, because they're so amazing, right hundreds, if not millions of people come up to the summits each year. And that has an impact on the vegetation up here, right. And so, we see a lot of degradation. And if we continue to let that happen, then we'll just see more and more degradation. And then with heavy rain events like we get now and climate change, that erosion just continues to happen even more. And so, it's really our duty to try to figure out how we can restore these places so that the next generation of people will be able to come here and see these amazing places and see these really unique plants that really many of them only occur on mountain summits in Acadia. So, keeping them here is super-duper important.
Catherine Devine 03:20 That's Chris Nadeau, the climate change adaptation scientist at Schoodic Institute. He's talking about the impacts of social trials on the summits in Acadia National Park. Basically, social trials plus heavy rain events equal lots of soil erosion and loss of vegetation. And this isn't a projection. Acadia is experiencing the effects right now. The Summits were once lush and green and lichen soaked. Now they have more bare rock granite and loose pebbles. It's pretty drab looking. So far, the efforts to minimize and reverse this degradation haven't been too successful.
Chris Nadeau 03:55 The park noticed that there was a lot of degradation of the vegetation on Acadia's mountain summits. And so, they tried to start roping off some areas to see if just keeping people off those areas would help the vegetation come back. But what we found is that the vegetation doesn't come back.
Catherine Devine 04:10 And the reason the vegetation doesn't come back? It's all about soil. On a basic level, what soil does is it essentially provides a home for plants to root grow and obtain nutrients. Plant roots collect nutrients held in the soil. The roots then reach towards water sources and pull the water towards the stem and leaves. And since plants uptake nutrients through water, bacteria and fungi in the soil break nutrients down so they become water soluble for the plants to use. Soil also anchors plants, giving them something to grab hold up and stabilize. So yeah, there's a lot going on in the soil. I don't think it gets enough credit. But basically, what's going on in the summits of Acadia is that there isn't enough soil for vegetation to grow in. Yeah, as I said it's because of social trails and heavy rain events. Knowing this Schoodic Institute and partners including friends of Acadia and NPS set out to find a solution.
Chris Nadeau 05:07 And so, about seven years ago, the Schoodic Institute and other partners, including the National Park Service and native plant trust, started some experiments to try to understand how can we restore vegetation on mountain summits. And we really found three things. One roping off areas doesn't work. Two, we needed to bring soil to the summit, and then three, if we bring the soil, the plants will just come, they'll colonize the soil that we bring up to the summit on their own.
Catherine Devine 05:35 I found a lot of hope and what Chris said, bring the soil and the plants will come. Give nature the space and resources to do its thing, and the vegetation will vegetate. Easy, right? We just need to get some fertile soil to the tops of the mountains and we're all good. Problem solved. Vegetation will grow again. In theory, this sounds fairly straightforward, but in practice, it's a bit of a different story.
06:03 **sound of people sanitizing soil**
Catherine Devine 06:12 That's Alex Carey. She's the restoration research associate at Schoodic Institute. She's spent countless hours sterilizing dirt to aid in one of the summit restoration projects at Schoodic. When I first heard that Alex was spending many hours sanitizing dirt. I was a little confused. Up until that point, I thought dirt was always well dirty. Let me explain. Since the dirt came from outside the park, it needs to be heated up to at least 180 degrees to kill any fungus or invasive plant seeds that could be damaging to the park. After the dirt gets sanitized, it needs to make its way to the summits of three different mountains in Acadia, Cadillac, Sargent and Penobscot. Getting soil up Cadillac Mountain is a pretty easy task, because there's a road to the top. But Sergeant and Penobscot have no roads, just trails, which makes this entire process a whole lot more complicated. So, the researchers had a brainstorm. They had to figure out how to transport a whole lot of soil over 1000 feet up to the tops of these mountains. They had a few options to consider a big one being using a helicopter to fly the soil to the summits. But that came with its own set of logistical challenges, mainly due to funding. But then, Chris Nadeau along with friends of Acadia and the National Park Service had a better idea. A soil hike. An event that would call on community members to carry some of the sterilized soil on their backs up Sargent and Penobscot mountains. They called it Save Our Summits. There'd be three waves of hikers, one at 7am, one at 8am and one at 9am. Everyone would get a black sack to fill with the weight of soil of their choosing. Hikers would fill their sacks with sterilized dirt at the base of the mountain, place their sack in their backpack and hike approximately two miles to the summit of either Sargent or Penobscot mountain, hikers' choice. I showed up to the event around 6am. The turnout was already surprisingly big. As I said the event was a joint partnership between Schoodic Institute, the National Park Service and Friends of Acadia, there had to be at least around 40 people working the event alone. I hiked up early with some of Schoodic Institute's restoration crew and NPS employees. They had to place signs along the trail and at the summit before the first wave of hikers started. The hike was much harder and steeper than I anticipated. It had rained the night before, so some of the rocks were pretty slick. About 45 minutes later, we made it and at about 8am the volunteers started rolling in. I headed over to Sargent Mountain to see how the turnout had been going. Emma Lanning, a biological science technician for the National Park Service was staffing the station.
Emma Lanning 09:50 So far, it's pretty early in the day. So, we've only had a couple people I think four people up here so far, but they carried a lot of soil. I think the first person had like 30 pounds of soil in their backpack. So, everyone signed up beforehand. So, it was kind of a mix of locals and people visiting, even people who work for the park, Schoodic Institute, or some of our partner organizations on their day off helping out.
Catherine Devine 10:15 One volunteer said it was his third trip. Some of the volunteers were just kids.
Young Volunteer 10:23 It was really fun, it was difficult. All dyadic take several breaks. But I really like the honors of bringing oil up to help get planning on vegetation.
Catherine Devine 10:39 In the end, more than 1500 pounds of soil was transported from base to summit, and absolute success. But they're not quite done yet.
Chris Nadeau 10:50 We got 1500 pounds up during the Save Our Summits event with 72 volunteers. But we didn't get all the soil up during t
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