High elevation forests are those areas right
at the edge of where trees can exist.
These areas we call subalpine forests.
And that's really what we're talking about,
are these places right up to the edge of where
trees are able to grow.
Here in the Southern Sierra Nevada Parks--
Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon--
we have five different species of white pine.
The species that we are paying special attention
to are some of the high elevation white pines--
foxtail and white bark pine in particular.
Our job as scientists is to monitor these areas
and make sure that we understand how they're doing
and how they're changing through time.
We identified high elevation forests
as a place that was likely to change in the future.
So we chose these species as indicators.
They're right at the limit of their climate tolerance.
So inventory and monitoring can be kind of technical terms.
What does that even mean in a natural landscape?
But they're hugely important to us
as the people responsible for taking care of this place.
So the first inventory is just that question of,
what's even here.
And that seems simple.
But when you have over 800,000 acres to look at
and a lot of those places are very difficult to get to,
take days, if not weeks, of hiking with heavy packs
to reach, that's a great question and one
that we haven't really dealt with before the inventory
program came along.
What plants are here, what animals, how many, where?
How has that changed over time?
And that change over time gets us into monitoring.
So we're responsible-- our legislation says
that we have to preserve these places unimpaired
for future generations.
If we don't know what's here, we can't tell you
whether it's in as good of a condition
as it was when we got it.
Whitebark pine is considered a keystone species,
and what that means is they support
a vast array of other species that
wouldn't be able to exist in these areas without them.
A perfect example of that is the Clark's nutcracker.
The whitebark pine and the Clark's nutcracker
have evolved together to where they now depend on each other.
The pine depends on Clark's nutcrackers for seed dispersal.
And in turn, the whitebark pine serves as the primary food
source for these birds.
Yosemite wouldn't be the national park
it is today without the biodiversity of trees
that we have here.
Whitebark pine is one of the most important species
at this elevation.
We're at about 10,000 feet right now,
and we're at that transition between the forests and alpine.
So from the whitebark pine's perspective,
Sierra Nevada is in better shape than many other places,
like the Rocky Mountains, where they've
been hit really hard by blister rust and beetles.
I'm an eternal optimist, so I have
to say that the whitebark pine will persevere.
And because we have a long history
of inventory and monitoring them,
we can immediately start to make management moves if we need to.
Here in the Southern Sierra Nevada,
it's one of the only places left in its range
where we still have not seen dramatic declines
in these populations.
One of the really cool things about foxtail pines
is they only occur in California in two small populations.
They're rare.
They're rare trees, and they grow very slowly.
Well, we're standing here in the middle
of an old growth foxtail pine forest in Sequoia National
Park.
These trees can grow to be thousands of years old.
They're some of the longest-lived pine trees
in the world, and they just are a symbol
of endurance and toughness.
Forest monitoring crews that are sampling these areas where
the trees grow, they are recording growth
and which trees have died and which have survived.
This is a snag, so it's a dead tree.
We want to try and determine the cause of death
or how long it has been dead.
And so we might look into the bark,
but here, most of the bark is gone already,
to see what kind of beetles may have made these marks.
The remarkable part about our monitoring
is that we will return to these places in three years
and again in six years and again in 21 years.
And eventually, these records will
become a long-term legacy of tracking changes
through time in these forests.
Our role as inventory and monitoring scientists
is to provide information about how these landscapes are
changing to the superintendents, to the park managers of not
only today, but of the future.
I think about how the stories that we're capturing
and that we're able to tell with the studies
that we're doing in these sites--
to me, that's going to be informing decisions that
are made for years to come.
And I care so deeply about these places
that being a part of that protection to me
is just extraordinary.
There was a saying by an old park ranger, George Wallace.
He worked in these parts in the '40s and '50s,
and he compared foxtail pines to the closest living
relationship we will have as humans
with a sense of eternity.
It's such an awesome mission, and I
feel a heavy sense of responsibility
to ensure that what we offer to the public
here, what belongs to the public,
is sustained in good health.
And we want to invest our effort in things that are truly
going to make a difference in the preservation
of these great landscapes.
It's worth it.
It's not only worth it; it's indispensable.
I don't think we can be effective managers and stewards
and fulfill our responsibly without that kind of data.