Instead

3– Looking out for the Quaking Aspen, with Dr. Paul Rogers | Day 3

March 13, 2020 Episode 3
Instead
3– Looking out for the Quaking Aspen, with Dr. Paul Rogers | Day 3
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Where there is an Aspen there is Dr. Paul Rogers right there too. Dr. Paul Rogers is a faculty member in the Wildland Resources Department at Utah State University and Director of the Western Aspen Alliance, a “venture between Utah State University’s College of Natural Resources, USDI Bureau of Land Management, and the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and National Forest Systems, whose purpose is to facilitate and coordinate research issues related to quaking aspen communities of the west.”

Our conversation with Paul covers the aspen eating habits of deer and elk, how shoving people in trucks is a great way to solve some problems, getting info from Czech charcoal checkers, and how to keep central Utah’s Pando, the worlds largest organism, healthy. 

Today is Friday, March 13th of 2020. My name is Wyatt Traughber. You could be cleaning out your dryer vent, but you are listening to this Instead from Utah State University's Office of Research.

I'm so excited because this installment of instead is all about Aspen, Utah's state tree. It's also my favorite tree and apparently a lot of people's favorite tree. In this conversation. I talked to the ecologist who's all about Aspen trees, Paul Rogers. We compare the Aspen, the eating habits of deer and elk and how shoving people in trucks is a great way to solve some problems, getting info from check charcoal checkers and how to keep central Utah's Pando, the world's largest organism, healthy. But before we get to that, today, Governor Harper announced that K through 12 schools will be closed to prevent the spread of covid-19. I was with my friend Alexis Bird when she got the news. She's an English teacher and basketball coach at Green Canyon High School. Luckily, I had my recorder with you when Alexis's mom texted her, so I turned it on.

My mom just told me that the governor just came on and announced that all of the public schools in Utah are closed for the next two weeks.

So what was the vibe at school today before school was canceled?

Today was a little different than yesterday just because it was just the teachers there. We were having a professional development day, but we didn't get to do things as planned because we were all prepping to put all of our courses online in case this happened.

What was yesterday like? How are the kids feeling about everything that's happening?

 Thursday after all the cancellations of NBA, NCAA tournament. No church and things The kids were very...buzzy. They just were asking us questions like what's going to happen if school closes, what do we do? You know, they're like kind of pumped, but I don't think they realize how hard it's going to be. So I'm just taking it one course at a time, trying not to freak out because there's really no reason to. You just got to do what you got to do. You gotta roll with the punches.

You just got to do what you got to do. And I've got to talk about something else besides the coronavirus. So here's my conversation with Aspen ecologist Paul Rogers.

Do you just want to say your name and your title? I'm Paul Rogers, I'm the director of the Western Aspen is an adjunct associate professor here in the College of Natural Resources.

Do, you like people to call you Dr Rogers or.

No, I do not. And it's even worse is to call me Mister Rogers. Oh, that would be worse. So just Paul. But you are the director of the Western Aspen Alliance. What is the goal of that organization?

The goal of the organization is it's really a clearinghouse of information for professionals, for researchers and so on. It's kind of a place where we can get a lot of current science in this broad field of Aspen ecology out to people. And when I say broad, it doesn't sound broad to people who are unaware, but everything from soil science to wildlife to trees and forestry and range management and climate science and fire ecology and on and on and on. And what I'm really interested in is getting more into the social human realm as well. So there's a lot of interactions with Aspen forests and they turn out to be pretty important to people, whether it's for a specific resource or some aesthetic desire.

We have so many people that come to me and say, this is my favorite tree, it's my favorite tree. That's become Utah's favorite tree. Yeah, they made it a state tree about five years ago and I was involved in that as well.

So how do people within the alliance work together? Is it mostly just sharing data sets or is it conferences? Great question. So it's a virtual organization. I'm the only employee really. How do they work together? So basically we're communicating with people online. We put on webinars. We have a quarterly newsletter, you know, something like this.

And we put that out to people, but there's six hundred and thirty some members and they're now international, but pretty much in the western U.S. So the main product, our bread and butter, is we put on two or three professional workshops each summer and we kind of jump around different states in the West and we tend to get 30 to 40 to 50 people at those. And again, they're from a variety of federal and state agencies, from universities, from citizens. NGOs is a big group. So, you know, you might think of Sierra Club or Grand Canyon Trust or some other kind of organization that's into conservation. So that's our main way of interacting with people, is getting them current science material and then training sessions in which we try to put that information into their hands.

So when you guys are jumping around from state to state to state each year, is there anything that sticks out as funny or interesting about what's different than them?

Yeah, I suppose there is. First of all, there's been this pall over Aspen that the sky is falling, it's dying everywhere and it's a big disaster. And You go to different places, and the reasons why Aspen is doing good or bad are quite a bit different. And one of the main things is that it's not dying everywhere. It's not a big disaster. However, there are some issues we face from place to place and they vary quite a bit. And then the people that are interested in it vary quite a bit too. For example, in Wyoming, it's sponsored by the State Wildlife Agency. Every year they do something called Aspen Days in which I'm the sort of master of ceremonies there or the main speaker. In other states, it's put on by a different agency or outfit. But but the biggest issue that we find is a surprise to people. And it's often wildlife, in particular deer and elk, the biggest problem for Aspen. And then we start getting into this sort of tangled web of why that's an issue. There's no predators or there's not enough hunting or there's too much hunting and all these kinds of things. Similarly, cattle or sheep can be a problem. And then we have too many and they're not moved enough and so on. And so interacting with these diverse groups of people is kind of what keeps me motivated. And people, you know, if you get them in the right mood, they're they're like sponges. They they love information. We'd think, you know, for a lot of people, this would be boring or it's too much too technical or whatever. But if you put it in front of them as if they're learning it for themselves, then it makes it fun and interesting and very interactive. 

So in preparing for this interview, I saw that there was a difference in the way browsing by deer and elk affect aspen,I didn't get to the to the explanation of that in your paper. So can you tell me about that?

Well, here's one angle at that: West wide elk or a bigger problem. They're a bigger animal. It's a really big deer. And so they eat a lot with the average person in the public doesn't know is these animals aren't as wild as we think, their populations are managed by people. So almost everything I do comes back to people and people's decisions.

And then here's the main difference. And I face it, this Pando clone, which will probably get around to sooner or later. Yeah. Is that deer are more comfortable around people and elk are not. So, whereas elk are the bigger problem in terms of browsing young Aspen across the west, deer are in the specific area because there's people there, there's recreationists, there's a few cabins, there's a campground, there's a road. And and the key factor there is hunting is not allowed, and the animals know that they really do. It's not a joke. They learn that. And we have some some places around the West where we've documented that animals show up and jump over the fence on the first day of hunting season, as you and I would if somebody was shooting at us. But they find safe places and that's illegal to hunt there near recreationists, just like it is in national parks or on private land. And the animals know that. They learn it quick because they don't got shot last year over this way. So they somebody shot at them. So they go to the safe place. So there's some big differences between those animals. And, of course, elk consume a lot more because they're bigger. They find these more desirable, the young Aspen. So it's when they're babies down here around your knee height that they're most vulnerable and their most nutritious. If that goes on for years and then into decades, you start missing age groups, right?

So down at Pando, the deer are more comfortable around the people camping around, so deer are more of an issue there?

Deer are the main issue at Pando. Secondarily, cattle do some damage there, too. And then in the wider west, elk are generally more of a problem.

And now there's incentive and this is controversial politically. There's incentive in wildlife agencies which are run by the state, not the federal government, to keep numbers hih so you keep revenues coming in because you sell hunting licenses. So we have a really quick mix here of ecology and economy, and they don't really work great together sometimes. And so that's a natural clash that we have yet to work out, I think effectively in many places.

So there's a lot of clashes and feelings around managing these lands where Pando and other Aspen stands exist. How have you found ways to work with the different stakeholders involved?

That's a great question. So as I as I indicated when we started, first of all, as a preemptive strike, people are drawn to these landscapes. They want to camp. They just think they're beautiful, they're meditative, all kinds of things. So they want to be there. Of course, when the yellow comes out and that leaves turn yellow in the fall, that's very exciting.

So I find almost all people enjoy them regardless of their interests or background or political beliefs. And so that's a natural starting point, bringing people together. People are out there, they're enjoying themselves. And I use this metaphor that sometimes we are standing in a circle, people with maybe three hundred sixty degrees of different opinions on what's going on here. But in the middle, we're looking at some problem, say it's too much browsing and everyone can see it. And we stop looking at each other and pointing fingers and blaming Joe or Harry or whoever that conservationist or the categories or whatever. And we and we start to focus on the problem itself. And then we try to focus on basically compromises, ways that we can work together. What's reasonable for you and how can we move forward? How can you maybe move your cattle over here for a couple of weeks, a year so that this can recover or take a few years off from this grazing pasture? If we can also get a reduction in wildlife while we're trying to grow this stand back, a forest grove is often referred to as a stand. And so those kinds of give and takes. And one thing that's been interesting I've discovered through this work over a while is when people they physically get in the truck together and ride on a bumpy road and we switch trucks and you meet somebody else. And then we have a number of projects where people have physically taken measurements together. So I can argue with you a lot if it's somebody else's data and someone else's science. But when we both gather data together and we count poop, we like to do that. So cow pies and deer pellets and owl pellets and the data is right there. And you and I collected together say we disagreed on this. It brings us together to some understanding and it shows me, hey, you know, my cattle are a little bit of a problem or maybe, you know, hey, there's too many wildlife or, you know, we can't take all the animals off the landscape. That would be wrong, too. Yeah. So how do we work through this together in some way once we understand the issue?

I want to go back to poop. When you're counting the droppings like deer pellets, for example, are you counting, like, deposition sites like oh, here some deer pellets' and here's some deer pellets or is it each individual?

Great question. So four deer pellets, you have to have a rule. This is what science does. And so if there's three or more in a group we call that one deposition and it gets a one, it would be a sort of equivalent in our very loose math to one cowpie. And these are relative numbers. We just want to get a sense of what we do is measure in a fixed area.

In this case, it's 30 metres long by two metres wide. How many little baby aspen are there? How many of those are browsed and then how much deer poop, how much cattle poop? And we could put those types of numbers together and say, what's the correlation between level of browsing and what animal visited there? And then when we do that, we get to kick the poop, because the reason why we do that, we kick it out of that area. The next time we come back, we're measuring only the new poop. So this is a science of poop is so fun. Yeah we are, we are shitkickers. That's what we do.

But that's only one aspect of what we do. We do a lot of other tree measurements and over time we get a good indication it's not perfect of the relative amount of animals versus the amount of damage. And as I said, we want a little bit of brows is OK, when you get so much that there's no force there.

So the situation in Pando, and I feel like I've beat this analogy into the ground. But imagine everyone that lived there was 85 years old. How long would that town live on? But it took us a while to get there, you know, and so we want some new ones always coming in. We call recruit's. Yeah. And if there's no new ones, we got a big problem. Yeah. And if there's no new ones for decades now we're in the situation I just described.

I think a similar thing happens in the LDS church congregations. You have what is called a newlywed and nearly dead wards and it happens when there's wards of geographical boundaries that are mostly old people. And then as those old people die, young people come in and buy their homes. And so you'll have like a giant primary, a whole bunch of old people and then one like 12 year old deacon to pass the sacrament on Sunday. And it's just something that happens in the life span of some LDS wards.

Right. I don't know. Yeah, it's the demographics right now.

You want them to be you like this sort of bell curve or something like that where it's evenly distributed. If you get those things skewed, you're in an unsustainable situation. And in this case, we can unravel it pretty clearly and point back to human decisions. How long do we graze cows? How many deer are there? And what is the impact of those at that recreational site? Yeah. 

I also read in your paper that you guys try to be a little sneaky when you're counting poop. So you're not attracting people who are around recreating to the site that you're studying. What are your methods to keep people from knowing what you're doing?

Well, that's pretty typical is that and we're not too sneaky, but we don't advertise them. And the reason for that is if somebody knew there was a measurement there, maybe they would start taking a tour group there, maybe they would start doing something else. And now I've got to factor in these people who are visiting that point. And maybe the data for that point becomes ruined over time because we've introduced a new factor.

So I haven't let you explain this, but Pando is the largest, heaviest organism on the planet. And I read that it's a male Aspen clone. So what does it mean to be a male Aspen?

It just means that all of the trees are diecious. So a clone is either male or female. And then when they pollinate, they basically would make a new genotype. Right. Many trees have male and female parts on the same tree, flowering parts of fruiting bodies. So that's what that means, and` in that whole network of one hundred and six acres is entirely male.

And so that's just that's quite common in that all aspen are either male or female by clone. It's just that what's really cool about this is you start to think differently about you're in the middle of that, say, what is an individual and what is a community? Because, wait a minute, this whole forest is an individual right or is it a tree? What's a tree and what's the forest? I like this quote that somebody came up with "a forest of one tree." So it messes with our mind. And I love those things when it's not ironed out. And we know it all and we there's a lot we don't know. 

But it makes us think deeper about these connections. And so, you know, this event I was at from a road trip to Pando. So there's a graphic designer. And those those folks are quite clever. Yeah. But it connotes some motion and some connectedness and some yellow and white and all that kind of stuff.

But those connections, those linkages underneath can be used as metaphors. I went to one the following year that had people from many different religious groups there talking about oneness. And why are we getting so hung up about our differences when we have so much together in common? And these linkages, for example, in this time right now with this with this potential disease coming to our country, are going to help us. They're going to save us rather than our isolation's. So people have used that and they are using Pando as a symbol of many other things. 

So I read that like aspen reproducing through seeds is pretty rare. What does it take for that to happen? Because I'm familiar with how roots send up shoots.

se. First of all, that science has changed rather rapidly. And I have a slide that I often use and I make fun of that term "rare." But that's how we managed all of our Aspen forests until well, some places even now, until recently. But the last twenty years or so, we found that these events are much more common than we thought. True seeding events. So new genotypes and basically the pollination of the male plant can cause these seeds there on like a cottonwood. It's like a lot of cotton and a tiny, tiny seed the size of a peppercorn. They can go miles and miles. So if you compare that to, say, a pine seed or something from a cone, it's heavy, it goes about three feet, falls right down unless a bird takes it somewhere. So these seeds can go a long way once you have a fertile plant. And then have to have just the right conditions and you have 14 days with that seed as fertile and so on, moisture and bare soil. But after wildfires, particularly very hot ones, is the most fertile ground that we know of for seeds. And now almost every wildfire, once we've developed the eye to look for the new Aspen plants, we're finding true seedlings. So in all through the literature 20, 30 years ago and more, this is a rare event. We are so lucky to find this now. We we just didn't know how to look. And a part of it's deceptive.

When the Aspen plant first comes from seed, it looks almost like a different plant. Then in year two, it looks like your little Aspen seedling, but the leaves are different, they're insulated and so on. They look very different than Aspen Tree. But so it's not that rare and it could be ecologically very important. But now we're just beginning to know about what that means. 

Speaking of seeds, from what I've learned, pine trees and aspen trees have adapted different to compete for space. Can you tell me what strategies either tree has?

First of all, I've kind of made my name and reputation and saying that there's only one type of Aspen ecology. But the point is that there's at least two different major kinds of Aspen environments. There's this pure Aspen forest also called stable or persistent, where they're not competing with conifers at all. And so let's set that aside. Yeah. What can you give me examples of those stable ones, the Pando Forest? So Pando Forest is not competing with conifers for space or light or soil or water or anything. It exists on its own many generations at a time. And much of the southern Utah Aspen forests on these high elevation plateaus is of that type.

Now we describe a bunch of other types that are sort of subtypes of that stable of the past. But those stable Aspen forests, are they stable and not competing because they have claimed that land so successfully? Or is it because they are in a geographic situation, elevation, precipitation wise, where Conifers just wouldn't thrive? It's probably some of both of those. 

For whatever reason, over centuries, that's what we mean by stable. And people mix with these words quite a bit. So I don't want to get too hung up on them, but a pure type stand that stays in that way, not for 30 or 40 years after a fire, but for hundreds of years, many generations like the Pando clone. 

I worked with some people from the Czech Republic and we dug these soil pits. We pulled out ancient charcoal up to a metre deep. And it comes in layers and we can date it. And we're just about dating it right now to somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago at in Pando itself and trying to see how pure that was over time, how many conifers we can identify the charcoals by tree species. It's crazy under a microscope, you know, and so we can say, well, this was dominated by Aspen this period, but not this period or this period and not then or there was big fires and lots of conifers came in and so on through a long period of time. Our initial results are saying that that was the same dominated by Aspen. We don't know for sure that it was Pando for thousands of years. So that's pretty exciting.

What makes the piece of ancient Aspen charcoal look different than a conifer?

It's the cell pattern, I guess. And I'm not an expert here. That's what I'm working with those guys. You know, I'm pointing to the east there. They have that expertise and they can identify a lot of plants just by little tiny pieces of charcoal, which is really cool. So let's set that aside for a minute now. What I would call traditional or conventional Aspen ecology is all based on this competition through time anywhere between one to four or five species of Conifer and Aspen. Right. And there you might say through time there, when I'm same time, kind of think of about a century or so pushing each other around. Aspen has the lead. If you have to grow something from seed, whether it's Aspen or anything, it's going to take longer.

But when all that energy's packed in the roots, they can be up to knee height or waist height in the same year there's a fire. So it's crazy, it just takes off. But so for 30 or 40 years, that forest will be dominated by Aspen. But over time the conifers, they went out, they do better with more shade and have some other factors that help them out. And now what we've heard a lot about in the West, and I don't exactly go with this theory, but it's published a lot, is that we're losing our Aspen. Aspen is in decline and they have all these sudden Aspen decline and all these kinds of things. But really, it's just a matter of climate and over long periods of time. Turns out the 20th century was probably the wettest century or was the wettest century in this area for the last thousand years and maybe two thousand years. And so you would expect there to be less fires. And it's playtime for conifers, right? The more fires, the better for Aspen and other types of disturbance; insects, diseases, avalanches, all kinds of things that take forests out. So that's all we're seeing is the tail end of that period. It's not a disaster. It's just what we call  for succession.

What kind of services do Aspen Trees and stand's provide?

Well, let's start, first of all, with Native Americans. So there's  in the bark, which we know better as a painkiller or aspirin like willows. And so it's thought that that was used as a painkiller to eat some of the bark. But what other services they provide, it's thought that they hold water, which is kind of a big issue in the West. And so, I mean, the forest as a whole holds more water than a conifer force. So think about that transition over the hundred years, again. The more conifers have, the faster the run off of water, the more Aspen, the more snow retention and the more water on site. And it grows a drain slower so that you can have it longer through the summer. There's some pretty good evidence that that's the case. So that's a good service. It provides a lot of forage for people who graze cattle. These are super rich undergrowth environments when they're healthy aspen forests. And so that's really rich for cattle forage or sheep forage, the number one service worldwide. And just I would like to get on to the world stuff here soon. Is biodiversity. And so in many places in the world, these forests, even if they're less than an acre in size, are really valued for the number of species they contain in our country. We call them threatened and endangered are in our continent. In Europe, they call them red list. Species that are threatened and endangered live in these forests. So they harbor a lot of species, maybe over 100 plant species in an Aspen forest in our area. Tons of birds and mammals use them on a daily basis. So that's a big value. It may not be the money part, but long term there could be there could be value in terms of pharmaceuticals that come out of these things. Water retention, just recreation. People want to go to those places. Yeah, everyone says it's my favorite place to camp, so they're not as direct. And then here's the one that's really pertinent to Utah.

I guess we're not as aware of how direct they are, but if they're holding water for us in Utah... That's a pretty big deal. I like recreation. I like to camp there. Well, we don't put a dollar bill on that right away.

So here are a couple other examples in Idaho. I'm sorry, I have been invited. I don't know what happened to this mean. They may be settled out of court to testify as an expert in court because somebody accidentally killed eight acres of his neighbor's Aspen by aerial spraying because he wanted to, for some reason, kill the Aspen forests for better forage for his cattle. It doesn't fit what I was just saying at all.

I don't know what that person was thinking, but he told the pilot to fly along the fence and the pilot did exactly what he said and killed half on one side of the fence and half on the other. So what I'm getting to is now that it's going to court, they're trying to put a value on one hundred years or so of tree growth and plants underneath it. It's really hard to do. We don't have a way to value those things in our human system. That's example No. 1. 

Closer to home here, I would I challenge anybody to find a ski brochure without Aspen featured prominently  on the ski slope, runs on their summer recreation in their fall pretty picture shots. And the number one income factor in ski resorts is not people sliding down the hill on boards. It's selling real estate at the bottom. And so that translates into a big economic factor, again, indirect in the ski industry. 

So I want to go back to talking about the biodiversity that happens within Aspen stands. Is that because you have leaves falling off each year and that provides carbon and nutrition for other things to grow as compared to like a forest of pine trees and conifers?

That's part of it. So you would have a richer soil that holds more moisture. But then all those plants, they hold a lot more moisture.

So that so if we could look at an aerial photo of a forest, this is the Pando for us. If we were just looking up here, there's hardly any conifers in this whole thing. So this is a stable Aspen community. This is a map of where the moisture is. If you look at an aerial photo of a big area and you see Aspen, the animals are thinking that, too. And that's where there's resources they need. And so they would have more droppings in those areas. Those would make the soil is more fertile, that would hold more water because, as you suggested, you have deciduous trees dropping leaves every year. So all these things combined to make them sort of locally super rich in plant species, which attracts a lot of invertebrates, insects, butterflies, which attract a lot of birds and so on.

So when you're working in these regions, what kind of partnerships are you having with people in the community or people supporting this research?

That's a great question. And and I'm going way beyond traditional bounds at this point. So I'm working with almost any kind of people you can think about. For example, artists, there's a  high end art shop in Park City called Pando Fine Arts. I worked with them a little bit. There's there's ranchers on the ground there at Pando that I've talked to and worked with. And they've come on our tours before. Right now I guess the big news here is this: I'm featured in a movie, an IMAX movie that just came out. We did a premiere. I'm a scientist. I don't know how to walk the red carpet. And so this movie just came out. I was going to show you this photo, which is sort of funny. You know, it's me with, like, Hollywood types, you know, nobody, you know, nobody famous, although, hey, Morgan Freeman narrated it based on that book you just pointed out.

Morgan Freeman says my name. You know, there's some little teeny stars in the world. Now that is an exciting accomplishment.  I mean, you got to grab on to the little things. Right. And let's be clear, my part in the movie, my section in the movie is just over one minute. Eventually, but it's going international. And it's all around the U.S. Here us and the world premiere at the Air and Space Museum. Oh, this was in Washington, D.C. a little over a month ago.

So that's a different community then. I work for this group that the T called Pando Populist's.

They're a group out of L.A. that's doing a lot of things. Their moniker is to create an ecological civilization and they use Pando, of course, as their icon. So, you know, scientists, students, ranchers, students of all ages, I'm going to do a class here locally for sixth graders, did a Montessori kindergarten class. That was super fun. 

So, the really diverse audiences, and I love that because as an adjunct faculty I have a lot of freedom, but I have no security.

So I'm going off and meeting with people and doing those kinds of things. So I know you're probably short of time, but at some point I want to tell you about the international thing. And then in this last nine months, three books, including this one, have come out featuring my work. And so that's pretty exciting, too, that it really it's not about me.

I'm not a special person, but it's about truly making a mark with something that you think is important, is going to help society and help our environment. So I'm super excited about that.

Yeah. So finishing things up, how are you going to take advantage of this coronavirus precaution driven break that we are all kind of on at the moment?

You know, I'm thrown off. I'm kind of bummed you might even say upset my. I was supposed to teach and do research at Mendel University in Czech Republic in six months, and I think it's canceled. You know, it takes a long time to clear the decks to make that kind of time available and a lot of paperwork and visas and all this other stuff we had to do. And so I'm reeling right now, you know, because we just got this news yesterday and I'll  do writing for sure.

I can do a lot of things remotely, but what I do a lot is networking with folks. So I got called by National Geographic and they might make a documentary and a woman's writing of a children's book. So I'm consulting with her about Pando. You know, I love that kind of super multidimensional outreach. So that's, I suppose, what I do most.

So another thing I'm doing I'm pretty excited about is every year I'm trying to write things that are not technical science. So more palatable for the general public. It teaches me a lot because we've become very adept at writing and technical language. But then I always joke, well, thirty three people will see that or whatever your number is, but it's low. 

Now, this past year since this thing was released October 17, twenty eighteen, so a little over a year, millions of people have seen my between this movie and between New York Times and me and Le Monde and BBC and all this other stuff. To me that's important. And again. It's not about me, it's about people understanding this issue and that now with this most recent paper, it has world ramifications. So that is important and that's what I'll be working on, is continuing to get that word out through non-traditional pathways.

Last thing I'm going to ask, so the very short amount of time I had to find information about you for this interview, a lot of the articles were from twenty eighteen. And they're talking about how Pando is struggling at the moment or dying. I don't know how grave those headlines made things out to sound. What strategies are we going to need to move forward to make sure that that stand is healthy?

Yeah, that's a great question. And so I'm all about not restoring composition, not individual plants or species, but restoring process.

So the processes that are missing there is that there's too many herbivores, there's not predators to keep their numbers low. Our current predators are hunting and automobiles. And so how do we get those numbers down, restore those processes and ideally do it without fences?

Now, I tell you, I'm kind of losing this battle only because I don't make the decisions. I just make the science. So I work in a collaborative group. A bunch of people make the decisions. The easiest decision for the way forward is to get a big bundle of money and put a fence around the whole thing. But then we get into philosophical. Is that what we want to see as a public is that the best we can do is essentially slap a big Band-Aid over the hole? It may work. It seems to be working, at least part of it. And I've and I've helped put up the fences. We have a little less than half of it fenced now, but we're creating something that's a world icon that we can't fix the causes. So we just put up fences. In a sense we're making a zoo out in the forest. So we get into these philosophical arguments. But the way forward will either be fencing to preserve it, but hopefully addressing the cattle in the deer at the same time. I'm more on the side of that. It's a more difficult problem. It essentially involves humans. And  humans are a lot more difficult to work with.

 So a lot of people don't love the idea of increasing hunting, but could that be a solution in that area.

What we would have to do is have the state or professional sharpshooters take some animals. And I had this great idea they would only listen to me to go out there either with Native Americans or to give the killed animals to Native Americans, I don't think would be a large amount. Now, just north of Pando, there's two hundred cabins or something and there's animals all in there. They know they're safe there. Yeah. And so that's the same situation. They're eating everything and people love it when they go there for a week, a year, but they don't realize that it's doing a lot of ecological damage. So it's what we call a messy or sticky issue. And so how we work through that is going to take essentially people coming into the same room with different viewpoints and say, where can we bend on this?

 Well, thank you for your time. I am excited about this interview and good luck with moving forward through coronavirus. Thank you.

The IMAX film Paul is featured in is called Into America's Wild. According to the film's website, dates for the Salt Lake City showings are still TBD. I wasn't able to find any information on that lawsuit over the Aspen Stan killed in Idaho. If you know anything, please let me know. Please subscribe. And if you have recently shared a mountainous truck ride with someone, why don't you send willing to this conversation? I'm Wyatt Traughber. Thanks for listening to instead from Utah State University's Office of Research.


The Western Aspen Alliance
Deer are smarter than you think
Amount of animals vs amount of damage
The heaviest organism on the planet
Aspen economics
It's about people understanding the issues