Litter bags filled with willow leaves and flowers prepped for deployment and deployed in streams at Mount St. Helens. Photos by Carri LeRoy
Litter bags filled with willow leaves and flowers for undergraduate Iris Garthwaite’s independent research project as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. We use metal ID tags to track willow identity, plant sex, and weevil attack status.
Willow leaves incubated in the streams of the Pumice Plain decompose and skeletonize over time. Photo by Carri LeRoy
Litter bags installed in streams help us determine decomposition and organic matter cycling rates. Willow leaves and flowers are colonized by microbes and aquatic macroinvertebrates that eat microbes and shred leaves. SURF student Angie Froedin-Morgensen focuses on invert ID.
Our research truck turned solar-powered drying oven – our solution to drying leaves at a remote field site! Photo by Carri LeRoy.
The whole crew gets involved when it’s time for peak leaf fall! Our studies are often limited by how much leaf litter we can catch at abscission. On multi-day trips, we get creative about drying leaves – we converted our research truck into a solar-powered drying oven!
Photo trap intended to measure stream flow captures a mountain goat running along Willow Creek!
Surely, it’s not only plants on the Pumice Plain! Ecosystems have gradually flourished as more species have filled ecological niches. Ungulates and other mammals have colonized the Pumice Plain.
Our team has documented many animals on accident in our photo traps intended to measure water flow, ephemerality, and seasonality of streams!
Huge herds of elk call the Pumice Plain home. They are protected from hunting within the National Volcanic Monument. Photo by Carri LeRoy
While hiking across the
Pumice Plain our team has encountered huge herds of elk. They were some of the
first large animals to return to MSH after the eruption and they utilize this
landscape for grazing the grasses, sedges, and willows of the Pumice Plain!
Sometimes our camera trap
stream gauges capture other things! A big fall storm caused massive sediment
movement in our streams and also carried other debris downstream. This partial
elk carcass got caught up on our stream gauge on Willow Creek.
Check out the black bear print on Goose Creek on the Pumice Plain of Mount St. Helens in summer 2018! Photo by Carri LeRoy
An elk leg got wrapped around our stream gauge during a high flow event in Willow Creek! Photo by Carri LeRoy
Ribbons of green show riparian vegetation along streams on the Pumice Plain. Photo by Shannon Claeson
Alongside getting to conduct research at Mount St Helens, our team has the opportunity to explore the beautiful landscape of the Pumice Plain.
The Pumice Plain is a 20 km2 region, essentially devoid of life in 1980, but slowly being colonized by a riparian willows and alders.
Close-up view of Loowit Falls on the north side of the mountain (right) and a corner of Crater Glacier (left). Photo by Shannon Claeson
Five new watersheds have formed on the Pumice Plain of MSH since 1980, each receiving water from different sources (springs, groundwater, snowmelt, glaciers). Crater Glacier is one of the only glaciers in the lower 48 to be actually growing!
We get to spend hours gazing across fields of wildflowers on the Pumice Plain of Mount St. Helens. Photo by Carri LeRoy
Landscape scale patterns across watersheds at MSH have allowed us to explore environmental differences across watersheds that don’t vary in age, parent material, slope, or aspect on the sterile and relatively homogeneous Pumice Plain, that 40 years later, is bursting with life!
Measuring stream width and velocity in closed canopy sections of Forsyth Creek, on the Pumice Plain of Mount St. Helens. Look at that riparian colonization! Photo by Carri LeRoy
When Mount St. Helens erupted, it resulted in a massive landslide that buried existing forests, streams, and watersheds. Since the eruption, five (5) novel watersheds have developed on the Pumice Plain. These streams on the north face of MSH have been our team’s main interest.
Undergraduates, faculty and collaborators have been able to conduct studies on environmental variation and biotic communities across these watersheds to address in-stream primary succession because of the unique ecosystem the eruption of MSH created.
We are especially interested in how riparian plants influence stream channel dynamics, increase shade, and input organic matter to these newly developing streams. Stay tuned for more about how willow sex differences and a wandering weevil alter in-stream ecosystem function!
Stream gauges in all five watersheds help us track water flow and sediment movement- even through the dark and deep snow of winter. Photo by Carri LeRoy
Tricky work of trying to keep our light loggers facing upwards in the middle of each streams – strap them to big rocks! Photo by Carri LeRoy
A group selfie after a long field trip! Wrapping up our field work in late summer 2018! Photo by Carri LeRoy
The past 3 years our team has been working under an NSF EAGER grant to Dr. LeRoy which allows undergraduates at The Evergreen State College to gain amazing field experiences and research opportunities.
Our team is composed of undergraduates, SURF students, research assistants, faculty, and many wonderful collaborators (stay turned to learn more about our collaborative work) that dedicate their summers to exploring the landscape of Mount St. Helens (MSH).
MSH is an exemplary ecosystem for our team to study how the flora and fauna are responding to large, intense disturbances as well as their processes of early succession.
We hike in all kinds of weather! Hiking along the Truman Trail at Mount St. Helens to field sites on the Pumice Plain. Photo by Carri LeRoy
Over 20 undergraduate students at Evergreen have been able to collaborate on this project! Three students at left with collaborator Joy Ramstack Hobbs from the Science Museum of Minnesota at right. Photo by Carri LeRoy
Fields of lupine along the Truman Trail across the Pumice Plain of Mount St. Helens. Photo by Shannon Claeson.
Lupine was the first plant to colonize the Pumice Plain at Mount St. Helens in June, 1982. Photo of a lupine today by Carri LeRoy.
Hello Ecology Enthusiasts!
To honor the 40th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption our team will be hosting a glimpse into the amazing work and research we’ve been able to be a part of on the beautiful landscape of MSH. Join us in our daily postings to learn more about what our team has been up to!
The Prairie Lupine
After the devastating event of the May 18, 1980 eruption, the mountain was laid bare. Just two years following the eruption, scientists found the first plant to colonize the Pumice Plain, the Prairie lupine (Lupinuslepidus). These beautiful purple flowers sparked excitement in the world of ecology and studies on early succession in areas followingdisturbance.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s content and dive deeper into our field work at Mount St. Helens!
The Leaf Litter Lab had the honor of presenting a small glimpse into each individual scopes of research to Christine Hoffmann, who works for the Public Relations Outreach here at Evergreen.
With focuses on the National Science Foundation-funded ecology research of Mount St. Helen’s, undergraduates have been able to take on multiple approaches to conduct individual research projects.
Iris Garthwaite is a Senior who takes on both a peer-mentor and leadership role. She’s conducted an entire project around willow catkin and aquatic invertebrate interactions to investigate flowers as detrital resource for stream ecosystems. With the end of her research project she has been working hard at picking a graduate school and writing her first first-author paper!
Brandy speaking about the Norman H. Anderson macro-invertebrate samples.
Brandy Kamakawiwoole is a Junior working on aquatic macro-invertebrate sorting, stream GIF imaging, and analyzing historical BMI records. The historical records are from the 1981-1982 Norman H. Anderson Collection Samples, making them the first aquatic macro-invertebrate samples collected following the eruption of Mount St. Helens!
Angie Frödin-Morgensen is a Senior who has an interest in freshwater ecology. She spends most her time working hard at a microscope sorting through leaf litter to identify aquatic macro-invertebrates. Her research focuses on macro-invertebrate community differences between female and male Sitka willow leaf litter!
Angie discussing the important roles of macro-invertebrates as bio-indicators of streams.
Maddie Thompson is a Junior with interest in environment studies and ecology. She’s been continuing the research on canopy covering influencing in-stream ecosystem function. She also takes part in her research project that focuses on Willow DNA extractions to identify microbial communities.
Lauren Thompson is a Junior studying ecology and environmental studies. She’s continuing the research on how environmental conditions influence organic matter processing across Mount St. Helens watersheds. She works jointly with Maddie in assessing condensed tannin’s and Willow DNA extractions.
Stay tuned… Iris, Angie, Maddie and Lauren plan to attend and present at the 2020 Society for Freshwater Science Annual Meeting!
Emily Wolfe (Evergreen grad ’16) just published research that she started in the Evergreen program “Environmental Analysis, 2014-15” in the journal Oikos. The research shows that a fungal endophyte, Rhytisma punctatum, which infects bigleaf maple leaves as big black “tarspots” can influence the rate at which the leaf decomposes and can alter the in-stream microbial (bacterial and fungal) communities. Emily learned leaf litter methodology and then went on to do amplicon sequencing of the microbial community growing on the leaves. She is now enrolled as a PhD candidate at Portland State University and is doing her dissertation on endophytes more broadly. She credits her time in EA and as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) while at Evergreen with giving her the tools to succeed in graduate school.
You can find the paper at the publisher’s website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oik.05619
You can request a .pdf of the paper by writing to leroyc [at] evergreen [dot] edu.
