 Hey everybody, thanks y'all for coming out to our fifth of our six naturalist journeys presentations this year Anybody for how many of you is this your first naturalist today's presentation? All right, welcome to our annual program. How many of you is this your second naturalist journey of the year? third fourth fifth Great well welcome and welcome back. I have a cheat sheet to remember all the things I'm supposed to tell you before we kick things off But most importantly or one of the very important things I have to tell you about is thank you to our sponsors I make this possible to be a Bidonation public program every year. It's our 14th year doing the naturalist journey presentation series So thanks to hunter mountain co-op and the Washington electric co-op for being our underwriting sponsors Also, thanks to union mutual for sponsoring this couple of talks here. So And that's it. So We do all sorts of other things here at the nature center anybody for this is your first time at the nature center Great welcome So we do all sorts of things here Lots of other programs I could talk to you for the next hour just about all the stuff They have coming up between now and the end of spring So instead of that just grab the calendar and we have the door and come back and join us for the birding walk We're coming to panel with us or anything between so With uh with that I will um, uh introduce Matt Peters. Um I'm not gonna say much. I'm just gonna just gonna throw it right over there. Okay. Okay Easy enough. Thank you Sean Let's get started here and thanks everyone for coming tonight I also want to throw out a special thanks to members of the upper upper winsky field naturalist group that Graciously decided to to bring their meeting to us tonight rather than making me go and kind of do a replay for them over in marshfield It's a it's another great Naturalist group that we meet meet monthly up at the jacos library in marshfield And if you want to get on an email list for that or anything Find that guy over there charlie cogbill or memorable Historical ecologist. He's the the keeper of the email list for for our group And with that I guess by way of introducing myself a little bit So I work primarily as an independent botanist and ecologist most of my work is In vermont new hampshire and adjacent states And then projects basically supporting biodiversity conservation in various ways um But over the last couple years I had the the wonderful opportunity to Travel to this place that I'm going to share with you tonight. Uh, wapishka in north-central kebek My travels there with my partner satcha peeler and our friends bob and kzano here Oh, I'll Throw them out there to help answer questions at the end or you can call them and so forth Our our travels there kind of began as uh, just sort of recreational exploratory We've been up there twice now into the last two summers in early august And then after our first trip there It uh, I had sort of taken botanical notes and put just casually things that I was seeing there and I turned out I was seeing things that had never been documented there before and so I realized there was an opportunity to make A real contribution to the knowledge of this place and and so Coming out of that I managed to secure a small grant and that was kind of the basis for then going back with a more focused botanically oriented trip So we'll I'll share some of that with you tonight But I wanted to start actually with just like a little quickie hand-raising poll How many folks have heard of wapishka or the mont gruel another name for this place Apart from an association with me or our travel I see a couple hands a couple hands like three three hands maybe Yeah, it's about what I expected. So not a well-known place by any means But in some place we should probably arguably all know about it. It's The largest alpine area low latitude alpine area in northeastern north america And and actually until a few years ago. I had not heard of this place either I became aware of it actually through a great book the eastern alpine guide that recently came out um, a couple mike jones and liz wiley who's the founders of beyond katowins, uh, a small, uh non-profit group focused on alpine conservation Uh, they they put out this great book the eastern alpine guide that I had the highly recommended and it's kind of a Mix of natural history guide and conservation vision and the little little travel guide thrown in there as well So that's where I first learned about wapishka And I guess From there, uh, you know, this was just sort of unfolded it It took a couple years of incubating and then we kind of just managed to To get up there and explore and see the place for ourselves And so I guess with the talk tonight my goals are you know, sort of Similar to the goals of their book in just introducing people to places that aren't well known And at the same time connecting them to places like our own alpine areas here in new england that are close at hand We we already care about them and you know, we need to to sort of widen that sphere of of knowledge and and concerns so that we conserve these because they're they're Really incredibly beautiful places wild diverse places And it would just be a tragedy to to lose them Oh, I just wanted to mention the name wapishka So like many of our alpine regions this translates to basically white mountains or mountains always covered with snow So if you see some place called white mountains You know, it could be one of many different alpine areas in northeastern north america of it and maybe So wapishka is the in you name for this region the sort of anglo or Kedakwa's name for region is the mont rule Which refers to the whole area not just a single mountain. So I'll probably end up mixing those two So just understand i'm talking about the same place So I thought I would start actually by By sort of taking us on a tour through our new england alpine areas or new england and new york northeastern us alpine areas just to Talk about some of the the range of habitats just sort of bring these places up in our minds Maybe touch on some of the ecological processes that are happening And then, you know, sort of we'll move on from there to wapishka so we can kind of connect the dots and compare So we'll start over in new york. New york has a small amount of alpine area sprinkled amongst a bunch of Separate summits in the high peaks region of the adirondacks. So this is just a view at the the peaks known as the gothics I can't really see the alpine areas particularly clearly here, but But you'll see features like some of these big slides Here just sort of indicative of the I guess the the extremeness of these Higher elevation alpine environments and some of the unusual physical processes that happen there and shape the landscape Jumping across the lake here to mont mansfield, of course our principal alpine area is looking north at the chin You'll see, you know, the the alpine vegetation is You know, it's largely restricted to the the exposed summit ridge line You've got the montane forests creeping right up the side So you get kind of this mosaic and there's there's tons of bare ground or rather bare rock there And the the purplish color in there. You can see this is a later season photo things And the season is much shorter of course in these areas. So fall colors there to come on much earlier Uh, we're we'll now bounce over to hamster to main briefly, uh, of course Main's alpine is centered up in katah the katah masif in Baxter state park. So this is looking into the north basin more remote part of uh, of Katah, which has uh, it's a Really wild area Down in the floor. This is a glacial cirque Down in the floor here. There's something referred to as an extinct rock glacier. I I don't even know exactly what that is but it's just sort of Indicative of some of this the sort of strange things that happen in these alpine environments things We don't find elsewhere on our landscape So a couple of the shots here from from baxter and katah So just really this sheer rugged almost like falling apart exfoliating rock Very uh, not a lot of vegetation there actually a lot of lichen and we've got subalpine ponds tarns here that's chimney pond and all the It's all the cloud here and fog a major feature of our alpine habitats that Both brings moisture as well as a damping down on temperature and light availability Which are of course very important for plant growth and what what can survive there Last shot from katah This familiar. I think this is hamlin ridge over here. Uh, so there are It's not all sheer. There are sort of broad flatter table lands kinds of areas and this and the sort of alpine heath rush community that one of our most typical natural communities in in alpine areas here in new england all This this tawny looking stuff here is highland rush for very common species up in our alpine sands so then sort of the culmination of our New england alpine areas not washington the presidential range of course this is from the lower lakes of the clouds looking up at the summit of washington You know tons of broken rock Basically as this felsen mirror they call it this this rock sea or fell field that gets called very little vegetation In much of those areas other mosses and little things tucked among the crevices loads of lichens, of course So, you know, there's still a lot of biodiversity there, but not necessarily the groups that we normally pay attention to more Um And and obviously aquatic habitats up in up in these alpine areas as well reversing that perspective so from washington back down at at lakes There and this is montman row again all this fell field broken rock dominating the landscape And And all this sort of grassy looking stuff everywhere these these cinch meadows It's not actually grass big aloe the sedge and we're most common alpine plants forms these big sedgey turfs meadow like systems up there And looking that was southern presidentials turning around northern presidentials heading up We've got jefferson and adams here madison just peeking around the corner More of the same in a way of this felsen mirror sedge meadow areas and then You know a little glimpse here into this the terrain of the the great gulf one of many Big rubber beans that surround the mountain and these are a very different Habitat from the exposed ridgeline areas They're greater snow accumulation. They're sheltered from the most extreme conditions So you get a bunch of species that grow there and not in other areas in the alpine zone So look at some of those things a little bit more alpine garden is a unique feature sort of unto its own in New Hampshire's alpine areas you get Sort of their springs up here. So you get this is an area called pinnacle meadow above huntington ravine that is this real Real moist saturated rich Meadow, there's there's some nutrient enrichment from all the melt water that works this way down these slopes So you get some unique species that show up in places like that Then dropping down into those gulfs like the great gulf only this is over in oak's gulf We get You see just in the color of the image is very green much lusher kind of setting A denser vegetation a lot more species that can survive here because it gets protection from From those deep snow beds Another shot in there just you know that that perfusion of herbaceous plant growth really lush stuff like You know the the false hellebore here that we associate with lower elevation places But it can survive way up high because it gets sheltered by the the snow depths that piles up here in the winter But certainly other species that are distinctly alpine in nature and don't don't occur in other places So then jumping back up on top Sort of a different kind of very relatively barren looking rocky habitat much finer sort of gravelly substrate and and weird soil processes This is a little bit hard to see but there are some Sort of longitudinal stripes you can almost make out in here a little bit There are soil stripes there There's all these sort of strange Soil processes that have happened because of the freezing and thawing the extreme freeze stop conditions that go on up in alpine Sounds things with names like solar fluktion and cryo turbation and fun words like that And I'd be remiss if I didn't throw in a winter shot in the alpine because of course it's it's cold and severe wintry conditions that are much of what Create the alpine environment this is from Madison looking back at Mount washington across the the great gulf here in the middle here On snow depth accumulation of snow and varying depths and or lack thereof where it's exposed by extreme winds Actually, I was putting these slides together. It was a couple some of them It was a couple weeks ago And then we had those really high winds and there were the wind speeds like 175 miles an hour up here Kind of thing. It's like, you know, just amazing conditions up there And that's part of what what shapes these places makes them what they are so Stepping back from the the images for a minute or to just sort of capture a sense of scale here quickly So so there's new york's alpine area is about a hundred acres sprinkled around a bunch of A bunch of different summits by 20 different summits. There's vermont I'll read something like 116 acres mostly on the man's field A little bit over on tamels home a few more acres there And then big jump up now we're in main Six and a half square miles of alpine terrain again Mostly on the katahdin mesif and a little bit on the nearby travelers range and some other summits in western and northern main And I should say the the circles are proportional roughly to the area involved if that wasn't clear New Hampshire we're talking 10 square miles now. We're really getting there. We got double digits of square miles And then we put all of new england and new york together. So this is all of our northeastern u.s alpine areas Rounding up. We're at about 17 square miles So you can probably guess what's coming next, right? So this is what pisha it's 1200 square miles. This is like the size of rodai like literally So it just completely blows out of the water what we have here in terms of scale not to by any means belittle what we have But it's just it's kind of mind boggling in that I mean the Title slide I started with you to get that sense of just you know seeing to to infinity to the horizon in alpine So That's where we're going the largest area of low latitude alpine ecosystems in northeastern north america. So Here's the quick overview map courtesy of google so From our place down here in south woodbury going about 700 miles north northeast Across the st. Lawrence and then head up the north coast as they call it of the st. Lawrence seaway across the saganae fjord there Yes, they're you don't have to go to norway or alaska to see fjords Just go up to the saganae pretty cool bluga whales and all kinds of neat stuff there And then this right here where the line changes. That's a big commo We'll city on the coast and then you you head north on the highway to labrador. There's pretty much only one road So it's hard to go wrong So it's uh root 389 you go about 300 kilometers just do north head on up there and and you get to this This crazy big Donut of a lake a reservoir actually we'll talk more about in minutes is the manakugin Reservoir a manakugin impact crater. It's a meteorite crater that we'll touch more on in a minute So we're uh 51 and a half degrees latitude. So not you know not extreme. We're not north of the arctic circle or anything like that but Getting arctic conditions in the mountains And I should point out You know, don't trust google when you're going on trips like this Not that accurate Not so bad, but you know, we took a day and a half to do the the drive up there So then just sort of big picture ecological context We're kind of going into the heart of the boreal forest, which is this uh, this huge Circumboreal uh band that kind of really circles the globe largely of dense black spruce dominated forest And and Wapishka is is basically right about where the sea in kebac is there So we're we're towards the north edge of that band of boreal forest And they call it lichen woodland is sort of the next tier. They're the next lighter gray So basically the forest starts to break up a little ways north of there Sort of uh becoming savanna like in structure except with evergreens, of course, so uh, so Wapishka rises as this island out of the sea of boreal forest Um boreal forest, you know very dense extremely mossy. I think moss cloaked You see similar forests in our mountains or some of our low cold hollows, especially in the northeast kingdom But uh, but nothing we have here in vermont is really quite like the true boreal forest That's that's black spruce dominated when you head up here So there here's a shot The highway to labrador most of it at this point, uh, most of the southern section is actually paved So it's not all gravel like this It's sort of like the alaskan highway It's sort of progressively become more and more paved through the years But it's still a pretty remote rugged road to travel there Uh, not a lot of services if you have problems kind of thing um and you know Hall trucks full of logs and hydro kebac stuff and so forth going Going down here at high speed And I the power piece of this much of the road actually there's a huge transmission power line corridor It's paralleling the road and at one point you pass this You know, you're out seemingly in the wilderness on let me on a road But just wild land around you and there's like this 10 acre substation kind of thing that just goes on and on and on with all manner of Electrical power stuff until eventually you get here The the barrage daniel joneson or the manic sink dam Which holds back the manikugan reservoir that huge doughnut shaped Water body that we saw earlier at one point this was I think the largest dam of its type in the world I'm not sure that it still holds that title, but But it's pretty huge So I just to follow through with the the impact crater and and dam Excuse me I'm a bit of a cough. So apologies for Hacking now and then here So this thing is it's like 60 miles across was formed about 215 million years ago when basically Apparently a comet broke up and various big chunks of it fell to earth a chunk that Made this crater. They think was about three miles wide Blasted this out The other craters are sort of I think there are four other craters scattered around the world That if you sort of worked the plate tectonics backwards, they all Form a line. They don't in present in our present globe, but Anyway, so that's that's sort of the the quick and dirty story of this crater Um, which then Geologically is totally unrelated to the presence of the mountains of whoopish got being there, by the way They just happened to be one right next to each other and then Last time I was up in the shuttle, you know, I just NASA photo obviously and you can see the the crater right there visible from outer space with a little, you know Aurora borealis just showing it thrown in for for fun You can see the the lights of the north coast of the st. Lawrence down here Hudson think that's Hudson Bay not just clouds Back there and you can't really make out what piece you could that clearly it might be this white patch But it's it's about the size of that white patch anyway The positive that that's it so that that Crater then it had natural water bodies, but with the dam it Backed up of course and it formed the full sort of the full donut there 35 there are 33.5 cubic miles of water Which by comparison lake Champlain is 6.2 cubic miles. So this thing is huge And You know Might be where some of our electrons are coming from you know Hydropec supplies a lot of energy to New England So anyway, uh, then continuing on a little bit further up the highway you finally get to the southern trailhead for Uppishka which which So Uppishka itself is uh, is trailless apart from basically two access trails that have been cut up to treeline one We took out the south end that goes up to a mountain called Montpropenture and one that kind of comes down this way from the north But this whole interior area these squiggles represent our our roughly our two trips in 2017 2018 And the the total sort of area that we covered was Sort of crisscross about 20 square miles worth of Terrain over the course of those two trips. We we'd hope to actually get like way over here like much further East, but it's just really slow going here Got big packs as you can see and Well having a botanist along never helps That's kind of thin so But you know, we found all kind of cool stuff so Well worth it Love to go back and explore even wilder parts or even further out So we got uh, I won't slaughter the French here, but if you can make that out we got a territory of autonomy and discovery Captures it nicely So a little little bit more overview So this is a topographic Sort of model or map the green Areas are the low elevations the orange and in darker colors progressively higher So you can see again, you know, 1200 square miles roughly 25 miles by 60 miles in dimension there and the The crater of course is over here Also about 60 miles across for perspective So it's it's kind of this this broad plateau that rises from base elevation about 1300 feet in the green areas Up to much of the plateau is around 3000 feet or so Uh And then the highest summits or the highest summit singular, uh, Montverrier Over on the western edge here is 3623 feet So so not especially high by like the standards of Vermont mountains But being this much further north and being east of Hudson Bay, you know, that's high enough to create alpine conditions Other things to point out here So there's uh, if you can make out this black line that kind of squiggles all around like that That's the boundary of this Wapisca provincial biodiversity reserve So I don't know how familiar folks are with designated reserves in Quebec Many of them don't provide perhaps They don't provide the same kind of protections that we might think of as you know a national park or so forth They have much more a different mosaic of land uses that go together Biodiversity reserves, however, are kind of at the upper end of protections Fortunately in this case so So the designated area there, which you know encompasses, you know, maybe roughly a third or a little bit more than a third of the full Wapisca massif That area is protected from industrial You know extractive uses mining and commercial industrial logging and and for their hydro development, for example There's also a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve site that's designated here that actually is much larger It encompasses the the crater and there's actually an alpine peak in the center of the crater is a sort of You know the sort of inverted I forget what you call it with the ejecta that comes up after the impact crater Is high enough to become alpine on its summit. So all of that is rolled into the Wapisca World Biosphere Reserve So oh oh and so the swiggles on the previous map. So that that basically it was all within that blue circle there. So so We only sort of touched the tip of the iceberg here with our explorations Yeah, this Especially this eastern half As there's a there is actually a rail line that comes down this valley So that that's a potential way of accessing it. But otherwise there's You know, it's a heck of a long way on foot Could get flown in potentially with a float plane something like that, but huge area So then just a brief geologic context here So the whole colored area is canadian shield the sort of continental core of north america Wapisca right there is in this this Youngest province of the canadian shield the grandville province So the shield has some of the oldest rocks in the world over three billion years old. So like three quarters of the age of the earth There's the youngest piece of it More like one billion years old. So it's still pretty darn old But and then you'll notice it swings down here and actually encompasses the adirondacks right there So geologically the adirondacks in Wapisca are related But not so with our other New England alpine areas The the rocks here are predominantly these agneous mafic agneous rocks. So, uh, you know, they had their origins in magma Rather than being sedimentary or something like that. Uh, so various types of gabbro Diorite and an orthocyte So an orthocyte especially a big player over in adirondacks Interesting thing about these rock types. Well, they're not something like blind stone that you know, we associate with high levels of calcium and soil nutrients and so forth They do have some potential for producing Enriched conditions that get botanists excited and put it that way that associated with with increased levels of biodiversity or specialized clients that can That need more nutrient rich conditions, especially mineral nutrients So so that tantalizing there's uh, I haven't found any fine-scale geologic mapping for this region though So in terms of like going out in the field and trying to find something doesn't help just tantalizing though Oh, I threw this in this is a glacial striation That we happen to see you know where a rock that was stuck in the bottom of the glacial ice Dragged across the surface and gouged this in That kind of cool, but just to remind me to briefly say sort of the only thing I've Read about the sort of origin of the the mountains themselves Of lapisca is that essentially this igneous rock is Is essentially harder more resistant to weathering than the surrounding metamorphic rocks and so through predominantly glacial processes We've been left with this Higher area than the surrounding terrain So I think with that then You'll bear with me for a little like botanical geeking out here for a moment few slides So they said our our second expedition was botanically focused I had this Grant from the New England Botanical Club to go up and try to learn more about what's there so Excuse me The names obviously wouldn't mean anything to folks, but look at the dates So the oldest one here and this is pretty much like the catalog of Almost everyone that's going up there and done any kind of botanical work So not that many like 10 people or 10 groups for starters, and then the oldest ones 1964 for comparison Botanists were going up and publishing things about Mount Washington and the presidentials in the early 1800s even late, you know, 17 late 1790s So, you know took a heck of a lot longer for anyone to get up here I think I forgot to say earlier So it's only been accessible by road since the late 1980s when they put in the the highway up there Basically to facilitate big hydro developments and mining interests and things like that But it did give us more access to this region And so things sort of progressed slowly over the years and then sort of a flurry of activity here around 2009 that that culminated in this this expedition by flora kebeco, which the kebeco botanical association basically this group of folks headed up there and Fortunately, they came back and actually compiled the report about all the things they'd seen and they they actually wrapped in Some of the earlier observations from from some of these guys They had actually written up some of their work Of course the problem with all of this stuff is, you know, you look at these names and They're all french names I don't read french and It makes it a little bit harder to to learn about what's going on Fortunately sachet does read french speak french to some degree And also fortunately, so I don't have to bug her all the time. There's this thing called google translate Is not always reliable, but it gets you there for the most part plus latin is still latin regardless of if it's in french or in english That kind of works out So that and the kind of just uh, there's lots of different ways you can describe The botany of the region, but to just kind of try to quickly succinctly encapsulate this So there floor kebeco folks their list they came up with 215 species of vascular plants that That were known to occur there and then uh, this is the beyond katahdin folks. Mike jones and liz wiley They a couple of other published reports there that bumped it up to about 218 I don't know. Does that sound like a lot of species to you guys or or not that many? And it wasn't sure how that would strike people Yeah, it's for being a a boreal and alpine place. It's it's not that bad actually, you know It's a pretty good start I think for comparison I've seen numbers for the presidentials kind of old numbers, but but of more higher elevation restricted species like Truly alpine species like 75 and then if you expand that range a little bit. It's like 175 species or something like that So so from that perspective, this is pretty good But then we think about you know, I can go out and survey, you know Maybe a 10 acre parcel that's got some habitat diversity some woods some fields some wellins And get close to that if it's you know, like around here kind of thing. So So in that perspective a place the size of brode island you would think would have a lot more than this number of species Um And you know as as I found Do so then just those 218 break down into 100 about 130 genera and 53 families So the thing about that that's less than two species per genus and about four species per family Just sort of perspective on the diversity here So out of that group of species there were seven or five Provincially rare species that had been that were known there The the first one there with the the picture might look familiar to gardeners here ladies mantle a different species than what you grow in your garden Uh, there are a number of them, but they they are wild north american species So there's a an alpine and ladyfirm looks very much like our common ladyfirm around here A norwegian cugweed that's this one here Orange agoceros kind of looks like a dandelion Um We didn't actually ever get to see that in a glacial sedge a nice alpine sedge So that I think yeah So so that's basically the sort of in a nutshell the state of the botanical knowledge when we started going up and exploring And so after a couple of years is some uh some focused work here This is will give you a real quick sort of summary of where things are at and and this is certainly still a work in progress here So I've personally observed 208 different species well up there And it turns out that 39 of those are newly documented for that whole region, which is like hey, that doesn't happen to me every day So that's pretty cool And so that that represents 16 new genera and four new families for this This Rhode Island sized alpine area So that's pretty fun. And then uh this winter since we've been back and I've had some time I started combing through digital herbaria which So herbaria are basically the museum collections of plant specimens dried to press plant specimens Sort of the gold standard for botanical documentation of of things And you know we've been compiling these for for centuries now really in the institutions around the world but in recent years People have started to digitize these essentially make databases of all those specimens So you don't have to actually go and look at that physical specimen at the herbarium to know something about what's there Sometimes they have photos of the specimen high resolution photos sometimes not And there sort of creates its own set of problems with sort of how much you trust the data you get from this but So these are three digital herbaria That I've pulled data from to look at what what occurs what's been found up in upishka And that has actually yielded 18 additional species that someone had collected but Sort of had slipped through the cracks of the other reports and so forth And some of that needs a little bit more verification. I haven't actually looked at those specimens in person To you know confirm identifications and so forth, but but that brings our total Up to 275 species or they're about so so that's a 26 increase in in the The plant species diversity there. So so that's pretty exciting again And not something that happens every day for for me. There aren't that many places You know in north america. I think that you can go and and do something like this So so that's really exciting as I say still work in progress I'm trying mostly trying to sort of sift through those Those herbarium records and figure out sort of confirm for sure, which are which are good And if any of them aren't a couple of other perspectives here to summarize this stuff so 32 of those Species of that 275 So 11% are not found anywhere in our northeastern US alpine areas So they just don't come this far south An example of that group so the flip side of that is that almost 90 percent are in common with our alpine areas So there's is a huge amount of floristic similarity But as a representative of that group Got pink elephants here, right? You can see it You have the the nice trunk and the ears and the head this is a Love sport elephant head love sport particularis grownlandica This photo actually is not from wapishka. I took this out in the the baritid plateau out west Uh, it does come further south out in the alpine areas of the western u.s. Not in the east here When I found it in wapishka, it was a little bit past so they can kind of see these purple stems here That's it. This is one that had actually been found back in the 80s by la bois, but no one hadn't seen it since and Found it there, but although in a different spot so it occurs in at least a few places And then I promise this is the only graph in the whole presentation It's a really simple graph it's just Which of those 275 species Which genera have the most species in So starting at the bottom here karex. That's the sedges. So sedges are the most diverse genus in north america plants in in north america as a whole And holds true up here is 31 species of sedges occur there Moving on up salix. That's the willows. So you've got a whole slew of willows 18 species A bunch of those are actually some of the specimen data that I'd like to be able to do a little bit more confirmation of some of them are you know things were much higher arctic that have been reported there, but but willows can be tricky and It would just be nice to be able to actually see some of those specimens But a lot of them anyway, uh, vaccinations of blueberries and cranberries. We've got this at about Eight or so and junkus are the rushes. We've got six of those And violets on top there for five. So those five genera together Are about a quarter of all of the species that occur up there So just another way of trying to encapsulate and describe some of the diversity there Uh, a couple of the willows just for fun here Uh, this one Northern willow just you know, this is our trips from both in early august the first week of august And here it is. This is a male catkin with the red answers Um, little flies going crazy on their nectar ring or I don't know. Maybe they're I don't know if they eat pollen as well Um willows are a great nectar source. Actually, you might not think of it looking at them, but they have a lot of nectar in there Uh, I mean just blooming in early august This and here even further back just emerging from bud. This was in a real a late-length snow bank area that just melted out I'm snow bed willow another one that likes snow beds and just these little round leaves are the willow and these tiny little red things are the Catkins and that's that's all it is Itty bitty things So and just one last piece uh here Um, so we had the the five rare species that were already known there. Uh, and then this one allen's buttercup Was uh one that I found and Got all excited about this. It was I initially looked it up and it was a globally uncommon species It was provincially rare very rare. Uh, this is this range map from the floor of north america It's got a couple of patches of of habitat here on the the East coast of hudson bay and over here in the mountains of labrador And then just these couple outliers including down here in the gas bay Uh, and so there's there's my dot there the red one and and then it turns out they've downlisted the darn thing Like now it's only provincially uncommon And which is you know, it means it's doing doing well They found more populations is what that means essentially they've kind of filled in the range map here along the Northern coast of angava basically But still it's a northeastern north american endemic species doesn't occur in other parts of the globe. So I'd certainly never seen it before so that was a pretty exciting one to find and and I'll show you the site that that came from later on Is it a pretty neat spot so uh, so that's sort of the The botanical summary in a nutshell here and now I I want to uh Take us through kind of a tour of some of the different major habitats And some of the plants associated with them. But so I wanted to start with these these old growth subalpine white spruce woodlands They're really cool Habitat structure very beautiful that basically this the savanna like structure except with evergreens instead of you know Oaks or something we might imagine A lot of A lot of sort of scrubby dwarf birch A couple of different species I think it's a mountain alder And this is a pretty unique type of forests or woodland system doesn't occur in other areas Um, and there's there's been some research that suggests Uh, if I get this right so that about five to nine thousand years ago This is a period called the hips of thermal where temperatures were actually a little bit warmer than today And we had these forests uh dominated by balsam fir with white spruce in them But then a subsequent cooling of the climate Basically knocks out the balsam fir white spruce is hardier than balsam fir So the balsam fir can't hack it white spruce is still standing there and then you get Uh an increase in fire frequency in the surrounding landscape that that shifts things in favor of black spruce Like we have in the current boreal forest as the dominant black spruce Uh sort of has a cyclical fire dependency with big standard placing fires But it's too wet up here for black spruce to really become the dominant and so the fires don't Don't persist and so you're left with it's sort of like you You subtract the balsam fir and the black spruce from the equation And you're left with these white spruce that are the hardiest thing around and so they they form these beautiful trees Uh maxim or the oldest ages are around 200 to 265 years We saw some cut logs on the trail up actually that we were able to count and they were they were sort of in that range over 200 years So it really needs system and really they're just I've got a few more images just to to show visually Just beautiful spaces really it's this you know the sort of thing with savannah environments where it gives you this sense of uh of Uh you can see but you can't see everything so there's this kind of continuous unfolding as you move through the landscape of always something around the next corner to discover and And see that just really uh They really struck me as gorgeous This is uh campsite near lakma jeek Uh thrown up there oftentimes patches of this woodland associated with large lakes Of the large lakes you can't near lakjoyel With this nice basin of white spruce woodland And full terrain Shot in there, you know, so this sort of open woodland with real brushy dwarf birches and so forth lots of lichens very lush and moist very spongy ground everywhere there in some places it would come down to Streams, uh towards the headwaters of the riviera tolustuk This was really fun actually not so much for the woodlands, but It was pretty warm this day. We've been on a big hike. We came down here It's a cooled off in the in the river a little bit and uh, so there's There's bugs everywhere up here, of course, right and I'll talk more about that later But there's a lot of deer flies actually so we We're catching deer flies And throwing them in the water to feed all these little Alpine brookies that are that live in these streams and they're like they're not skittish about people or anything Like they tend to be here And they they just you know, they're they're little guys too. They're they're just like that They would just hammer deer fly up your deer fly like all you could feed them You know sort of feels like I don't know After all the pain inflicted by the bugs on you Something that feels good about that I guess So anyway, so moving on uh moving up on up to the summit areas A very exposed summits, uh, we're really the the In some ways similar to our summit in ridgeline areas Many of the same vascular plant species, but but here it's it's actually lichens that really That really dominate this system. It's the ground cover is like half lichen really And not not across those lichens that you see on rocks, but like reindeer lichen kind of stuff tall big big thick mats of lichen Again, these summits are Like 33 to 3,600 feet that kind of elevation range Some lower elevation areas that get really exposed And and relative to our new england alpine areas, you know, there's not that much bare rock here And there's there's really none of that felson mirror Or fellfield type environment I don't know why that is exactly But it's not there another conspicuous Absence was the highland rush I mentioned in some of those early slides. That's a dominant part of our alpine meadow Habitats was it's here, but it's extremely limited Very little of it to be found But otherwise many of this of the vascular plants you see there are are the same I You'll notice the sort of socked-in conditions and this actually isn't bad sometimes It's much worse like, you know, hardly see your hand in front of your face kind of thing. So it makes navigation Interesting. We, you know, you see the the map case there. We Had a gps internet along. I used that especially for recording Locational data of plant specimens, but we sort of elected to do our navigation with map encompass rather than Doing it all gps based And so that was a fun challenge and it gets more challenging. We can't see where you're going So and and all you've got are 150,000 scale total maps which lack a lot of detail like entire massive lakes just aren't there So, you know, it gets interesting, but there are a few other visuals here. Just what this these alpine Area or the most exposed summit areas are like and just all the light colored stuff That's the reindeer lichen Like actually, I think this this lake back here Just not on the map It's as big as other lakes that are on the map, but it just wasn't there So, you don't know what you're gonna find. So this is Montverrier. This is actually the the tallest mountain in Mopisca 3,623 feet. So again, this the sea of lichen up here Uh, here. So interesting interesting things like there's a frost boil So you've got these cryoturbation processes churning the soil and just, you know, a random little pocket like this Not a lot of this going on, but and why it happens right there. I couldn't say Kind of a raised ring around it a little bit Cool mosses up here. I'm not going to dwell on non-vascular plants here But this was a really neat one rack of necrium. Who'd you know some that would just it would almost be wind sculpted You know, sort of like little waves here and these exposed summit areas And a close-up of the reindeer lichens here just Really neat feature here, you know, a whole other project the inventory lichens Up in a place like this very diverse though and then reindeer lichens Reindeer, caribou There are caribou here Unfortunately, we didn't get to see one. We really wanted to of course. So instead we saw caribou sign like scat Like antler rubs is this tree's been an all scripted bark and branches by the caribou Caribou trails this trail worn in here by the passage of caribou. We saw this in a couple of places Tracks Quarter tracks a nice sequence here on a little gravelly substrate. They're very very round You can distinguish them for like a moose track fairly readily the much rounder kind of track There's another caribou trail here. This is really cool A margillane about a mile long ridge and there's just this caribou trail that runs most of the length of the ridge so we just kind of Walk that trail down the ridge line. It's pretty neat to You know follow a path like that. That's just been worn into the landscape by these wild herds Yeah, so So i'm definitely not a caribou expert by any means i've done a little bit of reading about this And this so it's woodland caribou down here and it's I guess what's considered the boreal form or subspecies of the woodland caribou so the taxonomy of caribou is messy and has changed over time but This group it's not the migratory herds that you hear about like the george herd and the george river herd and leaf river herd That are you know hundreds of thousands of animals or at least once were They've declined as well These herds that the numbers I've found are are something like 3 000 animals across The entire range of that portion, you know much larger area than just lapisca So, you know you're talking about very very low densities of animals In this in an area like this unfortunately You know why that is exactly I mean it's it's partly human use of the landscape potentially things like hunting But also things like climate change impacts and And things like that. I don't think the the story is fully understood, but But oh and then since we didn't see any Sasha had to kind of demonstrate here. It's another antler rub here demonstrating the technique But fortunately Others have been luckier than us in this regard. So this is one of Mike Jones's photos He's a great photographer among other things and it was actually a lot of their work up there was wildlife focused They did a lot of camera trapping and so forth, but but he actually got to see this one snap the images Actually, you know this was this great photo of all these This guy's kind of in the way, but the planes are cold This is Canada Burnett A rare species here occurs along the west river in vermont and and not really any other places Here not not rare there. Although we didn't see it. It seems to be kind of restricted in lapisca But you know, I mean it just sort of I mean gorgeous and just really Sort of visually sums up the wildness of a place like this It's amazing animals like that So a few other wildlife things, uh, I wish I was a better bird photographer, but obviously others in the room Are far superior to this so this is a willow pomegranate something I'd never seen before you know a bird from from higher latitudes You know in winter they turn pretty much pure white summer in this two-tone kind of thing going on There's another a little family group of them I assume mother and four young ones here and it it hang out in these summit areas We didn't see a lot of them, but a few times That was pretty neat to see And then other wildlife so so k is pretty wild, but but not k. She's not the other wildlife All those little things, you know, so and so the bugs are are horrendous And they they inspire, you know interesting interesting styles like this and and some anti-social behavior You know and it's kind of understandable and I had case permission to use these images You know that and it's a combination of black flies mosquitoes deer flies and horseflies Kind of all at once and no seams. Yeah All at once in just numbers like you can't even imagine. I mean I Oh, we did we did and that helps to a certain point They're pretty intense though and they're pretty good at getting you I mean, I've been a lot of buggy places, but this is just out of this world kind of thing And Yeah Headmats are good Bug shirts are even better We also had a an actual bug Tarp meshwalled structure that like gives you some refuge In evenings when you're in camp and that sort of thing really is about physical barriers as the first line and then You know, maybe a little bit of bug built with one sort or another But I mean, they're serious here. I mean They could I think they can inspire allergic reaction And you know, or possibly even just outright drain you of your blood It's it's serious for sure Uh, I'm not sure that might be why k was icing your head here But uh, either that or she was just trying to you know, get the first, uh First ever a headstand in a snowman in in the piece My animation didn't quite work here Oh, sorry about that This picture on top here is messing things up a little bit. But anyway, so I wanted to uh Move on to snow banks and and our snow beds So in the new england alpine We tend to think of snow beds, which unfortunately are here here in this image a little bit as these discrete features where The snow piles up really deep and it lies late on the landscape into the summer and you get different species that occur there And they're pretty restricted things Appearing with peace guides like most of the landscape is like this So it's very different in that regard And the slide wasn't slightly messed up. You could see it a little bit better here Very lush growth there's like blue joint grass and raspberry and mountain goldenrod and all sorts of things in these places This in terms of why this happens this the slide on or photo on top here is not not so much A snow bank image, but you know look at this this A little scrubby tree here. It's got this really nice happy lush part on the bottom And then it's got this thing. It just looks horrible And and what this is telling you is that this is how deep the snow is basically This upper part gets just ice blasted all winter long and stripped down And this one's pretty short But in most places or many places on the landscape where there were trees like this It was you know that line was this high so the whole landscape is blanketed and Six feet of snow for for much of the winter if not more in many places So that's why you've got this snow bed landscape thing going on A couple more images of that again Just the lushness and greenness of this kind of shows you That snow bed character especially areas like this and along this lake shore Stopping for lunch there on the rock Another image here Bob hiking through a recently melted out snow bed. So you can see all this brownish Vegetation that's last year's batch. It's just melted out. It hasn't greened up yet So and a few species from these the snow bed kind of conditions some familiar things Purple mountain heather moss plant full Upline snow bed specialties again that snow bed willow we looked at earlier in here. This is a relative of our Our dewberry or swanqua. It's a raspberry type thing that this this is an arctic species that has Pink petals instead of white like our steps In terms of Animals we got the Hudson Bay toad that I guess has had various taxonomic status Addices These days, I guess it's sort of relegated to just a color morph variant of the American toad. It's it's brighter Or orange and just strong contrasts are beautiful and quite large. We saw them pretty commonly in these areas And thanks to thanks to brian's id skills here. I snapped the picture. He identified it an arctic fritillary I think do these get down to our alpine areas brian? They do they do in northern man. Okay. Yeah one site. Yeah cool, so But not not we didn't see a lot of butterflies, but Owing largely conditions probably but it's nice things like that and I think willow is among their host plants I can't remember for sure I could pour the violent or the violent species in it. Oh, right Yeah, oh, yeah I looked it up and I'm just keeping me Uh, a few of the the new species that I found not new species, but new to newly known from here black sedge a nice alpine sedge that Occurs here in Vermont. It's very rare occurs in uh, sort of limey subalpine cliffs here Oat grass doesn't occur in new england. This is a interesting little spike moss a spore producing plant We don't have this here Other one. This is alpine ground soil a relative of a golden ragwort that you see Like in our fens and calcareous wetlands and so forth This one's kind of fun false asphodel sort of a lily relative Species from higher latitudes again the north coast and so forth. Um, and then It's a dandelion It's not the dandelions in your lawn. This is a native There are a few species of dandelions that are native to the arctic and higher latitudes So unlike the one they're actually having problems with dandelions and uh snow beds on mount washington right now They've got you know sort of crews of volunteers going and weeding them out of these sensitive snow bed habitats because they are our You know european species that's coming in and invading unfortunately, but but these are a native dandelion So moving on into some some wetter types of habitats these cool string fend habitats So, you know sort of looks like rice patties or something but it's entirely naturally formed This forms sort of perpendicular to the direction of groundwater flow here They're often dominated by just a couple species of sedges including this one karex rara flora, which Is known to occur in new england only on mount katahden, but it apparently is missing hasn't been seen for a long time May have disappeared not sure, but it's it's quite common here points north Yeah, they they slowly step down. Yep. Yep And you most places we just small saw small pockets like this Some places you get to a huge expanses of this kind of pattern peatland type condition Neat, we don't we don't really have this sort of thing here Some other well in habitats Alpine bogs here Hello, thank you Um cotton grass meadows there's like snow floating here And uh, especially in the alpine bogs you get cloud berries or baked apple berries raspberry relative they They taste like baked apples. Okay. Say they're they're really great our first trick, especially we hit him just right For uh, their ripeness. So I can't say that this is really an ideal way to pick berries Like with a huge pack on your back You know you take what you can get while you're out there So it's it was fun to have those And what am I doing here? I don't know but there we go onward So, uh, let's just briefly a aquatic habitats as well there Lakes and ponds of all varying sizes big lakes all the way down to little You know almost a vernal pool like bedrock depressions and the most exposed alpine positions With shallower water and so forth and these these have their own limited flora Of course, but this is again the man who can reservoir in the background here So I won't go into a lot of detail there, but it's quite a wildlife kind of thing You know we had This you can't quite make it up and that's a beaver chewed Tree right up there about five feet off the ground So I figured that's got to be like giant place to see In fact, I think you know, this is probably snow way up here and when it came around and chewed this off or something But but certainly there we saw Beaver sign in many places on the landscape There are these lovely, uh, brook trout that I mentioned earlier. We did bring our fishing poles They are as I say rather small So it takes a few to to make a meal But I think the biggest one we caught was about like nine inches or something seven or nine But they just I mean incredibly vividly colored and just amazing little fish up there And they certainly have a lot to eat in terms of insects You'd think they would be bigger based on the food supply But they weren't so and again, thanks to brian for the photo ID here Another Species rare here in new england right quite rare here the ring or lake emerald. We weren't quite sure just for my Photo that lacks some key details here But uh, and was was cold enough in the conditions there that morning that I could just pick it up Hovering there to get going But by lots of dragonfly larvae and some of those pools Sampling of some of the aquatic wildlife and then so those are all sort of relatively widespread kinds of communities or habitats up here and then Go through a couple of very sort of specific sites and in terms of finding, you know new plant species out there Finding more restricted habitats was one of my goals because they're more likely to have conditions that support new species Kind of thing, but it's hard to pick out those places other than just kind of stumbling upon them. So this is This is this interesting head wall gully kind of system Like the ravines or gulfs in the presidentials only much smaller scale in this case But so this picture is from Our first trip 2017 and this is from this past summer There's sasha there for scale And if you you can match these up actually so this rock right here is this one right here And if you look here this white thing right there That's one little chunk of ice left. It was the first week of august That was the only piece of ice or snow we saw that year And then last summer You know The entire gully is still we were basically there at the same time both years The entire gully is still filled with snow and this was really cool It was also a little bit botanically disappointing to me because This year I had like 15 minutes to poke my nose in here and go like oh, this place is amazing And then we have to keep moving. So I really wanted to get back and see what all I could find here And and we did do that but obviously a lot of it's still buried under snow and ice Which was was really neat to see in another selfie You know, I mean it's like if sasha stayed there, you know, she wouldn't have even melted out by the following year So pretty interesting year-to-year variation. So There's another shot for perspective You know, we're talking 10 20 feet of ice depth still laying there and that that gully in early august And a shot just from the top looking down. You got that nice Sun-cut melted surface there really just a very Exciting place and chemical hot spot as I said Despite being filled with ice here this year. I did still manage to find a bunch of new things here some of them are are familiar from our Our head walls and gullies here in in new england So this feature actually occurred on a mountain called Mount of Züria But I actually realized just the other day looking through all my Botanical references and so forth. No one had actually ever documented august area the plant From upishka I just assumed given the name of this mountain that someone had found it there and and some Geographer that was naming things must have known as plants So I don't know how else that mountain would have come up with that name But lo and behold august area is there in this head wall gully And and we found out one other small head wall kind of spot It's certainly not a common plant up there at all A relative of like your garden sorrel french sorrel is a tangy part a lemony kind of leaf flavor if you if you eat it. It's nice little pink fringed fruits We got an alpine bittercress here this shows up in Over in Mount Washington one of the few brassica moss family plants up here The moss plants in the background there again over in this one. We've got these little kind of star shaped rosettes That's an alpine cullweed It turned out to be a new species from up here that this also occurs over in Mount Washington very rarely And this one kind of need a subaldia Relatively abundant here in snow beds Um only known from Mount Washington talking about being I think in uh in New Hampshire But um appears at this point to have been extirpated unfortunately and and sadly Historically at least botanists were a big probably a big part of that decline There are a huge number of specimens in this plant from Mount Washington inner barrier Um and now No one can find it anymore on the mountain people who know knew the exact kind of spot it was last seen A few decades ago and it's gone back and looked and Not there anymore and so we can hope that it's still there in the seed bank or some other hidden nook or cranny But uh I think be one I think it would be the first species lost from our alpine doing the alpine areas in in recent history Um So that's a little bit of a sad story Hopefully not the last chapter in that story though And and actually the the folks from beyond pittadon had had uh spent some time up here studying populations of this species with the hopes of informing management Here in new england whether that's reintroduction or some kind of management at existing sites Just trying to learn more about what the species does in a place where you can Don't have to be quite so worried about Your impact on it So then just briefly a few of the new species from this this spot We had an arctic bluegrass so like kentucky bluegrass, but an arctic species relatives there We had a northern anemone there in the middle Another a different buttercup. So there's the allen's buttercup. I talked about earlier That was in this gully and then another buttercup That's also from kind of a similar kind of habitat distribution. I mean, that's my finger How small that is This thing like, you know, melted out of that snow bank, you know a week ago and here it is already Blooming like crazy Just really cool to find things like that, you know, and that's part of its unique adaptation here Is to be able to do its whole life cycle in this really compressed period of time of the Bearing chickweed here Another species that when I was actually hoping to get back and I saw that in 2017 Still under the snow bank last year when I was there. So I think get to see it again there I'm trying to collect a specimen of one of these little guys and it takes Fine work and I'm going to be careful about that and then the last job is such a cool place And couldn't resist throwing another one and looking back up at that that ravine So then Last one of these kind of sites I wanted to touch on Again these these kind of hot spot areas that I was hoping we would find things like this Bob is actually the first one that keyed in on this calcareous cliff And as I alluded to before Calcareous settings get botanists excited because they have all kinds of special plant species associated with them And and actually We have calcareous cliffs in vermont that are quite like this in flora many of the species that are rare here in vermont And many of the same species actually showed up on this one little patch Basically, you see this this orangish stuff right in these areas It's a lichen called the elegant sunburst lichen. That's the vivid orange thing It's a calcophile. So it's easier to zero in on visually And they you know not everywhere on this cliff But this one little area for some reason either the mineralogy of the rock is different or there's moisture or you know Water flow concentrating things and there is this whole perfusion and I forget now Seven six or seven different species that showed up there and nowhere else in all of our Heart travels. So a couple of those white mountain sacs of rage It's white mountain sacs of rage not white mountain sacs of rage There's an aiming thing because there's a purple mountain sacs of rage and a yellow mountain sacs of rage as well One of those one of the name things One of the the little cliff ferns smooth cliff fern woodsia showed up there But just a really neat spot it sort of encapsulates the the feeling of discovery out there Um just another kind of overview shot of that cliff again that real uh calcareous spot was right in here And this was like pretty much the view from our campsite And we didn't know this would be here. We just you know had a big hunch from the topographic maps that there was some topography there and uh Wow Just blew us away Enjoyed exploring there so That's where i'm going to end with the sort of ecological explorations I wanted to shift gears then and just talk briefly a couple slides here about uh, sort of I guess our our potential to impact this place by going here and our impacts and alpine places in general To kind of bring this back to the beginning So this is one of our camps by another lake block joyelle excuse me By chance we happened to camp at this exact spot in both of our trips a year apart Um, and it was actually there's this thing right back here It's actually an old stone fire ring that it was clear that people had actually camped here before us as well Um That was the only sign and we were actually I was kind of relieved when we got here the second year We hadn't planned to come back to this spot. I was relieved to see that actually, you know You couldn't tell that we had been there a year before I mean I think we stayed there two nights the first time but um, but of course, uh Alpine areas, you know, well the the plants that live there are incredibly hardy to the environmental conditions They're really vulnerable to to trampling really there. They just don't stand up to uh to Being walked on essentially you got a lot of wet ground in this case erosion happened really readily and and Seeing a place like this, you know in this huge landscape. We end up here twice someone else is obviously camped here before You know, even though there's this huge landscape people tend to gravitate towards small areas of that landscape So even at relatively low levels of use there's this potential to start impacting the place and so finding the right The right ways to behave when you're there and then from a larger perspective to manage recreational use for a place like this It'd be hard to find those balances, but something that we need to think really carefully about and we of course tried to use Leave no trace kind of approach to our time there and minimizing our impacts And It's really hoped we didn't leave much trace. Although I have to admit so this pole here It was a dead-down tree, but we we needed it to be able to set up our our survival shelter here in the bug tower And and we had actually created this pole the first time that we went there and stashed it in a thicket back over here and The first thing we did when we got to this site as Bob went over and went into the thicket It was like the pole, you know, so we could set up our bug shelter and so we we did leave a trace But it was just a a stick that will with some cut-off ranches that will degrade hopefully But you know some of the other traces that people leave behind are not so fleeting perhaps We didn't see a lot of evidence of other people. In fact on our second trip We didn't see anyone at all the entire week that we were out there But you would occasionally run across these kind of campfire scars You know a charcoal is the litter that lasts as they say these things aren't going anywhere for a long time That turf is not going to heal itself readily In other areas you get, you know, this is actually the trail coming up but Only takes a little bit of hiker traffic and those things get worn in and the soil Bosches away as soon as the plants are gone and once the soil is gone and your prospects for recovery are just really really reduced so You know, and that's that's in this incredibly wild otherwise trail less environment Which is both a wonderful thing and a cause for concern, especially as You know burgeoning interest in recreational activities and and they're actively promoting recreational use of this area to some extent a lot of that use is actually wintertime snowmobiling and skiing to some extent, but Uh, certainly summertime use has High potential for impact with relatively low numbers of people being there The bugs do offer some protection from, you know, too many people coming there, but and then, you know, so I It's important to think about in really wild places like that This is franconia ridge probably the most visited alpine place certainly in the northeast Um, I don't know. Maybe the world. I'm not sure it gets huge amounts of hiker traffic doing the the loop on franconia ridge and you can see this really over widened Trail On you know, it's it's large enough. You can see the trail running all the way down the ridge line. So You know, I just And bringing this up I you know, I just want to kind of connect the wild places to our alpine areas Close to home and and emphasize our need to really steward these carefully and Make careful decisions about how we use them Because while they're they're rugged in some ways. They're very sensitive in others And then just the other big threat that I see to these places, you know is of course climate change I mean these things are our little islands perched on the top of our mountains and Potentially can get just pushed right off the top and you know This was not something I was expecting to be doing when we went up to Bukeska You know, I did not think I would go swimming while I was there I'm biting the insects aside like temperature-wise. I did not think I would go swimming But uh this last summer, uh, we had days over 80 degrees up there And while you know, I can't make any claims based on a single data point like that It it seemed aberrant to us I'm not sure and just to make the point that that climate is a very serious threat to these or climate change Human induced and we need to take that very seriously if we want these places to continue to exist and to do everything we can to combat that So I think with that I'll wrap things up And you have to take questions we're going to throw out a few acknowledgements certainly to my co-explorers here Uh, and then the Merhoff Botanical Fund of the Greenland Botanical Club Gave us partial funding for the second trip up there the botanical inventory Or exploration Mike Mike and Liz from beyond Katahdin both for their inspiration and for ongoing sort of uh encouragement and Specimens I just got a box of specimens from them the other day and things like that and then local folks Charlie over there, Brett Engstrom, Scott Bailey, Brian for for contributions from You know lending floras to general encouragement identification of various things And then and and sharing experiences in other wild places. We've been encouragement Dominique there My contact at the the Quebec ministry with this extremely long name But they they sanctioned our our trip officially and I'll eventually be providing them information so that they can use that in their management of the region And lastly a shout out to case back country meal plans here for keeping us well fed through the whole journey They really spearheaded our our food and logistics for this And with that happy to take any questions A combination of conditions to clients and outlining the environment if it's subjective or how do you know when you're there? I Like it Well, I I think you could look at that in in a lot of different ways and Maybe I should defer your question to to charlie cogbill over there who's done all kinds of research on Where tree line falls oftentimes it's it's defined by Tree line essentially the absence of trees i'm getting a thumbs up or at least a thumbs sideways from charlie But where but why does tree line fall where it does is the next question then and is that climatically induced or is it because of You know soil limitations and things like that but The first cut is really the absence of trees. I would say And then you get into a gradation obviously with those white spruce woodlands That are sort of subalpine In in nature, but yeah, is that satisfied? Yeah Yeah, to some extent I know that Many of them were more or less in the same or at least in the the same set of western Hills or mountains that are the most accessible from the highway Certainly most of the groups that have gone Since the highway went in we're on that west side Some of the earliest groups actually though did go further afield including like east of the the rail Line kind of gorge that goes down through the middle I'm not sure they may have had you know air transport to get into some of those areas I'm not sure how they got there, but Actually, it's it's one of the challenges of working with the digital or barium data you can They plot these things on a map, you know google map kind of thing You see, you know, this is where all the specimens came from but But then you start digging into it and you know, well, is that really where it came from? Or is that just where the coordinates ended up with you know from the you know the One or two decimal points of of you know, uh lat-long coordinates and so It gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of where where everyone has been but but yeah There is some spread but mostly it's on the west side where more or less where we were so You know, what else lies to these down there? Who knows? Yeah Yeah So, uh, yeah, sorry, I probably should have clarified that so Vascular that I refers to actually the presence of certain kinds of of vascular tissue cells in their stems But but basically the distinction between vascular and non vascular plants is you know leafy things versus mosses and liverworts So non vascular plants are mosses and liverworts. I'm sorry. I should have made that clear earlier Yeah, other questions. Yeah Is there a history of indigenous people there? It's a great question. I wish I knew more about that You know the the name Wapishka is an in you name That said It's a little bit hard to imagine folks living here all year round given the surrounding milder conditions so The real answer is is I don't know In terms of that cultural history Obviously an important piece in understanding a landscape like this there are There are still in you trapping rights to some of this land base I think mainly beaver And other other forbearing You know species there's There are links up here. There's been research looking for wolverine up here The beyond Katahdin folks did a huge project around that There's a lot of camera trapping never found one, but it's kind of like still possible. It's it's great habitat for them Hopefully they'll come back if they're not there now But yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I wish I knew more about that Yeah, Ellen Yeah Trying to do like pollen samples in the lake bed or something. Yeah, see What it was like then and maybe could accept anything about what's going to happen Yeah, you know and and certainly That kind of work has been done in a lot of different places. I'm not a I'm not aware of it being done here. They're there. I have read There's a study that not looking at pollen so much. Well, no pollen was part of it but they in they did sort of a 1000 kilometer north south Transact of alpine sites across kebek that didn't include Wapishka But caught a bunch of other sites and and especially looking for Charcoal remnants in the soil especially down at that organic soil mineral soil interface And actually the conclusion of that whole study They were able to radio carbon date the charcoal fragments then to to figure out You know when the fire that produced that charcoal happened and their conclusion from that was that a lot actually a lot of the kebek Alpine areas today Were were fire created in fact by they were forested fire massive fires came through destroyed the the forest canopy And and it's actually in a recovery process of closing back in over or that's what they're inferring Over longer time scales Although sometimes not that long I was talking about this with Eric earlier that some of them they think may have become Open as little as you know 500 years ago or something like that So there are studies of various kinds of you know more esoteric little bits and clues that are hidden in the landscape like that I'm not aware of the pollen stuff happening here So yeah Other questions. Yeah They're there We did see a little bit of sign a little bit of scat and actually on our on our on the trail Out at lower elevation this last trip nice big old bear tracks right in the mucky trail on our way out So we carried most of our food in in various types of bear resistant food containers just as a safety precaution Again, we didn't see any bears. We didn't have any problems You know other folks have gone up there without Uh, you know bear resistant food containers and have had no problems But again camera trapping work by the beyond katahdin folks Definitely documented black bears up there using that habitat You know population density or anything I I really don't know but they're there. Yeah Yeah, just like they're in our alpine areas too here in new england. I mean I was up in the alpine garden last Last summer in this great big bear scat right out in the middle of the alpine garden, you know full of Full of alpine blueberries. So yeah, they're up there Yeah Other questions Toad blood, maybe I maybe they can suck on one another. I'm not sure Yeah, it's one of the unfathomable things about the hordes of biting insects Like what do they do? I mean, there are other large Animals, you know bear moose caribou, you know and then smaller animals Uh, I'm not sure to what extent they can each use those other groups Um, but somehow they keep reproducing And in terms of like uh recreational use up here, I I don't know good uh numbers, but I think I've seen something like Uh 500 hikers a year or something like that in in recent years and things have been increasing Um, I'm not totally sure how accurate that number is but So I don't know that probably not enough to sustain all the biting insects We certainly fed them some Yeah, I may Right, you know, I mean their their larvae are are, you know, their filter feeders essentially aquatic Uh, so that's that's probably really their chief food source They only need an occasional blood meal to then make the next generation to keep it going Yeah Thank you