Long Science in the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve

It was at the invitation of The Long Now Foundation that I visited Mount Washington for the first time as a graduate student. Camping out the first night on the mountain with my kind and curious Long Now friends, I could sense that the experience was potentially transformative — that this place, and this community, had together created a kind of magic. The next morning, we packed up our caravan of cars and made our way up the mountain. I tracked the change in elevation out the car window by observing how the landscape changed from sagebrush to pinyon and juniper trees, to manzanita and mixed conifer, and finally to the ancient bristlecone pines. As we rose, the view of the expansive Great Basin landscape grew below us. It was then that I knew I had to be a part of the community stewarding this incredibly meaningful place. 

I’d entered graduate school following an earlier life working on long-term environmental monitoring networks across the U.S. and Latin America, and was attracted to the mountain’s established research network. My early experiences and relationships with other researchers had planted the seeds of appreciation for research which takes the long view of the world around us. Now, as a research professor at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and a Long Now Research Fellow, I’m helping to launch a new scientific legacy in the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve. Of course, no scientific legacy is entirely new. My work compiling the first decade of observational climate data builds on decades of research in order to help carry it into the future — one link in a long line of scientists who have made my work possible. Science works much like an ecosystem, with different disciplines interweaving to help tell the story of the whole. Each project and scientist builds on the successes of the past. 

Unfortunately, the realities of short-term funding don’t often align with a long-term vision for research. Scientists hoping to answer big questions often find it challenging to identify funding that will support a project beyond two to three years, making it difficult to sustain the long-term research that helps illuminate changes in landscapes over time. This reality highlights the value of partnering with The Long Now Foundation. Their support is helping me carry valuable research into the future to understand how rare ecosystems in one of the least-monitored regions in the country are adapting to a warming world. 

The Nevada Bristlecone Preserve stretches across the high reaches of Mount Washington on the far eastern edge of Nevada. Growing where nearly nothing else can, the bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva) that lend the preserve its name have a gnarled, twisted look to them, and wood so dense that it helps protect the tree from rot and disease. Trees in this grove are known to be nearly 5,000 years old, making them among the oldest living trees in the world. Because of the way trees radiate from their center as they grow, adding one ring essentially every year, scientists can gain glimpses of the past by studying their cores. Counting backward in time, we can visualize years with plentiful water and sunlight for growth as thicker, denser lines indicating a higher growth rate. Trees this old provide a nearly unprecedented time capsule of the climate that produced them, helping us to understand how today’s world differs from the one of our ancestors. 

This insight has always been valuable but is becoming even more critical as we face increasing temperatures outside the realm of what much of modern life has adapted to. My research aims to provide a nearly microscopic look at how the climate in the Great Basin is changing, from hour to hour and season to season. With scientific monitoring equipment positioned from the floor of the Great Basin’s Spring Valley up to the peak of Mount Washington, our project examines temperature fluctuations, atmospheric information, and snowpack insights across the region’s ecosystems by collecting data every 10 minutes. Named the Nevada Climate-Ecohydrological Assessment Network, or NevCAN, the research effort is now in its second decade. First established in part by my predecessors at DRI along with other colleagues from the Nevada System of Higher Education, the project offers a wealth of valuable climate monitoring information that can contribute to insights across scientific disciplines. 

Thanks to the foresight of the scientists who came before me, the data collected provides insight across ecosystems, winding from the valley floor’s sagebrush landscape to Mount Washington’s mid-elevation pinyon-juniper woodlands, to the higher elevation bristlecone pine grove, before winding down the mountain’s other side. The data from Mount Washington can be compared to a similar set of monitoring equipment set up across the Sheep Range just north of Las Vegas. Here, the lowest elevation stations sit in the Mojave Desert, among sprawling creosote-brush and Joshua trees, before climbing up into mid-elevation pinyon-juniper forests and high elevation ponderosa pine groves. 

Having over 10 years of data from the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve allows us to zoom in and out on the environmental processes that shape the mountain. Through this research, we’ve been able to ask questions that span timelines, from the 10-minute level of our data collection to the 5,000-year-old trees to the epochal age of the rocks and soil underlying the mountain. We can look at rapid environmental changes during sunrise and sunset or during the approach and onset of a quick thunderstorm. And we can zoom out to understand the climatology by looking at trends in changes in precipitation and temperature that impact the ecosystems. 

Scientists use data to identify stories in the world around us. Data can show us temperature swings of more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit in just 10 minutes with the onset of a dark and cold thunderstorm in the middle of August. We can observe the impacts of the nightly down-sloping winds that drive the coldest air to the bottom of the valley, helping us understand why the pinyon and juniper trees are growing at higher elevation, where it’s counterintuitively warmer. These first 10 years of data allow us to look at air temperature and precipitation trends, and the next 20 years of data will help us uncover some of the more long-term climatological changes occurring on the mountain. All the while, the ancient bristlecone pines have been collecting data for us over centuries — and millennia — in their tree rings. 

The type of research we’re doing with NevCAN facilitates scientific discovery that crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. The scientists who founded the program understood that the data collected on Mount Washington would be valuable to a range of researchers in different fields and intentionally brought these scientists together to create a project with foresight and long-term value to the scientific community. Building interdisciplinary teams to do this kind of science means that we can cross sectors to identify drivers of change. This mode of thinking acknowledges that the atmosphere impacts the weather, which drives rain, snow, drought, and fire risk. It acknowledges that as the snowpack melts or the monsoonal rains fall, the hydrologic response feeds streams, causes erosion, and regenerates groundwater. The atmospheric and hydrological cycles impact the ecosystem, driving elevational shifts in species, plant die-offs, or the generation of new growth after a fire. 

To really understand the mountain, we need everyone’s expertise: atmospheric scientists, hydrologists, ecologists, dendrochronologists, and even computer scientists and engineers to make sure we can get the data back to our collective offices to make meaning of it all. This kind of interdisciplinary science offers the opportunity to learn more about the intersection of scientific studies — a sometimes messy process that reflects the reality of how nature operates. 

Conducting long-term research like NevCAN is challenging for a number of reasons beyond finding sustainable funding, but the return is much greater than the sum of its parts. In order to create continuity between researchers over the years, the project team needs to identify future champions to pass the baton to, and systems that can preserve all the knowledge acquired. Over the years, the project’s technical knowledge, historical context, and stories of fire, wildlife, avalanches, and erosion continue to grow. Finding a cohesive team of dedicated people who are willing to be a single part of something bigger takes time, but the trust fostered within the group enables us to answer thorny and complex questions about the fundamental processes shaping our landscape.  

Being a Long Now Research Fellow funded by The Long Now Foundation has given me the privilege of being a steward of this mountain and of the data that facilitates this scientific discovery. This incredible opportunity allows me to be a part of something larger than myself and something that will endure beyond my tenure. It means that I get to be a mentee of some of the skilled stewards before me and a mentor to the next generation. In this way we are all connected to each other and to the mountain. We connect with each other by untangling difficult scientific questions; we connect with the mountain by spending long days traveling, camping, and experiencing the mountain from season to season; and we connect with the philosophy of The Long Now Foundation by fostering a deep appreciation for thinking on timescales that surpass human lifetimes. 

To learn more about Anne’s work, read A New Tool Can Help Protect California and Nevada Communities from Floods While Preserving Their Water Supply on DRI’s website. 

This essay was written in collaboration with Elyse DeFranco, DRI’s Lead Science Writer.