Thanks to the Northern California Botanists for inviting me to speak about Halstead Meadow, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks at last month’s annual meeting in Chico. See the whole talk here:
Hot off the press: 20 years of research in Yellowstone
I started my professional ecological research with my Masters project in Yellowstone National Park more than two decades ago. During that project I helped establish the long-term research plots and data collection methods that led to this just-published summary of what happens when willows are protected from browsing and have extra water provided by simulated beaver dams.
As we hypothesized, the small streams in Yellowstone that used to support resident beaver for centuries, but lost them in the 1920s-1930s, have not seen a rapid recovery of willow just because wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s. Nor have the beavers returned in significant numbers. The impacted ecosystem, where streams eroded through the long-abandoned beaver dams and dried out conditions for willows, needs more than just reduced browsing pressure to recover.
Here’s a TikTok-er doing a good job summarizing our paper: https://www.tiktok.com/@natureexperienced/video/7331856319521017119
Click image below to go to free online paper:
