On this page you will find a number of The Natural Laboratory multimedia presentations that discuss some of the impacts of climate change and what Point Reyes National Seashore is doing to reduce its carbon footprint.
Audio Podcasts
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Declining fog in coastal California?
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2012 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Mike Vasey and Todd Dawson about recent studies indicating that the fog is declining along the California coast.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
[Interview with Mike Vasey]
Cassandra Brooks: Can you tell me where we are right now?
Mike Vasey: Point Reyes Peninsula, which is really one of the...one of the fog capitals of the universe. And looking out over, uh, Point Reyes Headland, and Drakes Bay, and the Pacific Ocean, and it's a fantastic scene. Along the coast it's particularly exciting; you have so many different unique species that occur.
CB: That's Mike Vasey, a lecturer at San Francisco State University and PhD student at UC Santa Cruz who studies plants on the California coast. The rich, lush environment of Point Reyes—and really all of coastal California—heavily depends on the fog. During rainless summers, this fog—which can account for 1/3 of the ecosystem's water input—is critical to the persistence of the local plants and ecosystem.
CB: Earlier you were explaining to me where fog originates from. Can you tell that story to me now?
MV: Let me, uh, start here on the coast. We have upwelling of really cold waters—very rich, nutrient rich—right off the...right off the immediate coast. And then, winds that are warmer, that have a lot of moisture, come sweeping in off the Pacific, and when they hit that upwelling cold water, they condense into fog. Then the third big factor is that you have these, uh, hot air masses that are moving out towards the ocean at high elevation. And as they move out towards the Pacific, they kind of depress down and cause an inversion of that condensation—that cloud layer—so it becomes this so-called marine layer. And this occurs late spring through the summer.
[Interview with Todd Dawson]
CB: But recent studies have indicated that the fog is declining from the California coast. I went to meet with Todd Dawson, a professor at UC Berkeley who has studied California fog for decades. In a recent study with former graduate student and postdoc Jim Johnstone, Dawson found some troubling trends.
Todd Dawson: And Jim and I basically discovered that, if we looked over the last 50 to 60 years, we started to see that, not only temperatures along the coast were warming up, but fog was actually declining. And when we started to really look at that even over longer time frames, we began to see, really, over the last century, fog has been declining, and it's declined by about 30 percent in about 100 years here in coastal California.
CB: Are you able to see any impact on the environment yet from this? Or will it take longer to see a shift?
TD: We're beginning to see some signs of that...that change in the fog-water inputs maybe having some impacts in the southern parts of, say, the redwood range. So, you go down to southern Big Sur, right at the very southern end of where the coast redwood lives, and we begin to see, now, that the summers are a lot drier, soils dry out, they're drier for a longer period of time.
CB: And it means that, perhaps, the redwood range will shift north, or will just decrease, or might go away all together?
TD: Yeah. Some of the predictions that have been, um, sort of, recently released, and this work has been done by a woman named Healy Hamilton, that's really been interested in, sort of, modeling climatic envelopes of plants. And she's focused very specifically on the coast redwood. And she said just what you've said, is that the climatic envelope that's gonna favor the coast redwood is gonna creep its way north into Oregon and, also, it's gonna creep its way west. And, of course, that's impossible because as we go west, we hit the Pacific Ocean. So, what that really means is that the envelope is getting narrower, it's moving north. And, at the southern end of the range, it's gonna get drier and hotter and we're probably gonna be losing trees there, eventually. Whether that happens in the next 20 years or the next 50 years, we can't really say yet.
CB: What can people do, you know? What can the national parks do, or the state parks do to deal with that?
TD: Well, ther...I think there's a couple of strategies that we've been talking with the parks, um, about. Um, of course, there's always playing a very active role. I mean, you know, we can plant trees, and we can plant trees into areas that may be much more favorable—little microclimatic areas—little niches that we know could be very favorable to healthy redwood growth. Um, those are, obviously, gonna be wetter, cooler areas 'cause the redwoods really love those. We could also try to—in a...in a, sort of, entire geographical context—go and do an analysis of where are those climatic niches that might be very favorable for future recruitment and healthy growth for mature trees, and make sure those areas are set aside.
CB: A few of my friends I mentioned to that, you know, I was doing this story on how fog is declining in the...in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz area, they said, “No way! It has not. You know, I see just as much fog. There's more fog!”
TD: You have to take, kind of, the normal oscillation, along with the long-term trends, to really, kind of, understand how something like fog decline or temperature increases really play out. In our human experience, you know, we kind of remember one year at a time. And I think, sometimes, that's why people say, “Hey, wait a minute. It was a really foggy year last year!” And you go, “You know, you're right. It was.” But in the long-term picture, it's actually been on the decline.
[Conclusion]
[theme music]
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Burning Ancient Life: The Geology of an Oil Reserve
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2011 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Ivano Aiello, a geological oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, about how we burn ancient life to power our civilization and some of the issues that result from fossil fuel pollution.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[theme music fades out]
Phytoplankton form the base of the ocean's food chains transferring energy from the sun to sustain the global ocean. These tiny floating plants account for half of the photosynthetic activity on Earth. They also generate the majority of our fossil fuels.
[Interview with Ivano Aiello]
Ivano Aiello: Ninety-five percent of oil is marine algae, marine plankton.
Cassandra Brooks: Ninety-five percent?
IA: Yeah. I mean the vast majority of oil comes from marine plankton.
CB: That's Ivano Aiello, a geological oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Monterey Bay, California.
According to Ivano, plankton populations bloom, then die and drift to the seafloor. Slowly, they accumulate, getting compressed and buried under sediments. And, so long as they are in low oxygen conditions, the plankton will be preserved.
And how long of a time period are we talking about here for all of this to happen?
IA: Millions...millions to hundreds of millions of years. It takes millions of years for oil to form. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So, even though, probably, right now, there's oil...new oil being formed all the time, it's…
IA: We'll have to wait for millions to hundreds of millions of years. Yeah. No. It's, um...it's the scale of things we are talking about is insane. So, yeah, our rate of consumption is orders of magnitude faster than anything that has to do with the actual formation of oil. We are exploiting something that moves so slowly that there is no way that it can be regenerated anytime soon.
So, but that's what we use in our cars—something that formed a hundred million years ago. So, it would be really nice to have this in gas station so people will say, “Wait a second. You know, I'm burning this thing in the next two hours and it took 200 million years to form?!”
CB: And it isn't even just gas for our cars—our entire western lives depend on petroleum products. Our roads are covered in tar. Petroleum based plastics are all around us—in our phones, computers, cameras, toys, clothes, toothbrushes, and cosmetic bottles. And almost everything we buy at the grocery store is covered in plastic.
And while we once found reserves of oil so rich and abundant they came bubbling out of the ground, we now have to probe ever deeper and farther. At this point, we have to use a great deal of oil to drill for more oil.
IA: So, that's the problem. And that is that when we were working on land, mostly, and you could poke just the ground and the oil was coming out, that was it. Costed, I don't know, one gallon of oil to drill 100 gallons of oil. But now, we are talking about one gallon of oil to drill, I don't know, 10 gallons of oil or 20. So, it's becoming more and more expensive. So, that's the problem.
And when you push the technology offshore, not only do you increase the risks, but also, it's very expensive, you know. An offshore oil rig is a really expensive thing to run. But our thirst for oil is so much that we are...we are really like drug addicts right now. We are looking for a little drop somewhere.
So, I gave a lecture after the oil spill…
CB: You did?
IA: Yeah, on the Deepwater Horizon. So, that's why it's actually neat that you asked me to talk to you, because I, actually, I was, uh, reading more about, uh, offshore drilling and, uh.... So, this is one...this is a map from 2006. There are 3,858 oil and gas platform only in Gulf of Mexico. It's like covered.
CB: No way!
IA: Yes, way. I mean look at that. They are just next to each other. So, just think about when you have a hurricane going through this thing. It's insane.
I...I don't know. Our society is a fossil fuel-based society. Our civilization in the last several hundreds years has been—I mean, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—has been completely dependent on fossil fuels. But that's why we had this amazing, uh, increase in technology, I mean, in the last few hundred years. The technology has been...and also life quality, in a way. I mean, unfortunately, you know, it allows us to travel, it allows us to make clothing and...and containers and...
CB: Everything.
IA: everything, everything. But it's a limited resource.
CB: Here in 2011, we are at a crossroads. Those tiny plankton sinking and compressing over millions of years can't support our appetite for energy. As humans, we have incredible ingenuity, which is why we've been so efficient at using up our reserves of oil. As we look to the future, perhaps it's time to apply that same ingenuity to cutting energy consumption and employing alternative energies, ones that don't depend on ancient ocean plants.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Ocean Acidification: Where will all the seashells go?
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2011 in which Cassandra Brooks interviews Ann Russell, Terry Swyer, and Andrew Dickson about the effects of ocean acidification on shellfish.
Credit / Author:
Cassandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[somber piano music begins and continues through most of the following introduction]
More than a hundred thousand marine species built their bodies using calcium carbonate, including snails, oysters, sea stars, coral, and plenty of planktonic animals.
This incredible diversity of life evolved over millions of years as animals figured out ways to pull calcium and carbonate ions from the water to build shells and skeletons so robust that they remain intact long after the animals perish.
But all of this is changing. Our addiction to fossil fuels and the billions of tons of carbon dioxide [CO2] we're pumping into the atmosphere each year may be undoing millions of years of evolution in a geological blink of time.
[Ann Russell Interview]
Ann Russell: Geochemists and oceanographers have known for a long time that when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid.
Cassandra Brooks: That's Ann Russell, an ocean geochemist at the University of California, Davis who studies ocean acidification in Tomales Bay, just east of Point Reyes National Seashore.
Almost one third of the world's carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans, says Ann. This excess CO2 reacts with seawater, freeing hydrogen ions, which lowers the pH and makes the water more acidic.
Living in more acidic waters is bad enough for shell-building animals, but CO2 adds another problem. Animals need both calcium and carbonate to build their skeletons. But the extra hydrogen ions in the high CO2 water bind carbonate, reducing the amount available for animals to build their shells. So, what might this mean for the future of calcifying organisms?
[music]
AR: Just to bring in some of the geologic perspective on this, 18,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum, atmospheric CO2 was 200...200 parts per million. Then it rose at the end of the glacial period.
CB: But it only rose to 280, Ann says. And the increase happened over an 8,000-year period.
Since the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide has now spiked to more than 390 parts per million. That's an increase of 110 ppm in only 250 years.
AR: So, they're faced with much more rapid change than has ever been seen in the geologic record...ever. We don't have a geologic analogue for the rate of change going on right now.
[Terry Sawyer Interview]
CB: Given how fast the ocean's chemistry is changing, it's no surprise that we're beginning to see widespread effects in many calcifying animals, including those we like to eat. Oyster hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest have recently experienced massive larval die offs. When scientists measured local seawater, they found that during certain times of the year, the waters were corrosive enough to be the culprit.
Terry Sawyer: It's fairly insidious, as far as the effects, if you're talking about degradation of shell because of the lack of ability to bind the calcium carbonate, which is what our bivalves use to build their homes.
CB: That's Terry Sawyer, one of the owners of Hog Island Oyster Company in Marshall, California. Terry said that young oysters are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification. Their thin shells dissolve much faster and they struggle to make their transition from planktonic larvae to settling out on the sea floor. In general, more acidic waters simply stress the animals out.
TS: So, what is the...what are we seeing, you ask. Let's say, in the past five years—let's go even ten years—we're seeing disease, a lot of disease issues. Why are they becoming more, uh, susceptible to disease? So, one, maybe there's an introduction of that disease from another shellfish growing region. You know, maybe there's transport going on. Maybe there is stress. And that's where we go into the OA.
CB: OA or ocean acidification.
Hatcheries and oyster growers are actively discussing mitigation strategies, like only pumping in seawater during low CO2 periods or installing seawater treatment systems.
[Andrew Dickson Interview]
CB: These strategies might work in the short term, but they would prove ever more difficult as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise. And they're sure to continue rising. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the oceans won't quickly return to pre-industrial levels.
Andrew Dickson: That's one of the biggest concerns—if we add CO2 to the oceans, and then we just stopped, how long would it take. CB: That's Andrew Dickson, a chemical oceanographer with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
AD: One picture is that it would keep going up a little bit, because the CO2 in the atmosphere has not all yet dissolved in the ocean. But after a while, it would start coming down. Unfortunately, "after a while" is tens of thousands of years. We're putting it in over a few hundred years, and if we leave it to purely natural processes of our planet to take us back to where it would—I don't like to use the word—perhaps, "prefer" to be, the general chemistry, it's going to take tens of thousands of years.
CB: Do you have any visions in your mind of what the future ocean's going to look like in light of these changes? [pause] Visions, nightmares, dreams…?
AD: Visions, nightmares, dreams, I don't know. Clearly, it's going to change the possibility for a variety of calcium carbonate organisms in certain environments.
The coral reefs—if they grow more slowly, they are always being hit by waves and broken up. So, you have to keep growing back. If it's harder for them to grow, then they may get to the point that they're not growing fast enough to stay the same and start shrinking. And the coral is a wonderful place, um, the reason it looks so beautiful—with all the fishes and everything—is because it provides so much protection for all these varying different species. It's a whole ecosystem that is kept there, in part, just because there's this reef.
CB: We've touched on, sort of, worst-case scenarios of...of animals dissolving. What's, sort of, what's the best-case scenario of what...what we could expect in the future?
AD: Probably, the best case would be a combination of things happening at once. We could reduce how much CO2 we were putting in the atmosphere so that we never went to the stage to where it's guaranteed to be bad—just to where it might not be good. We might be lucky. There could be organisms that have within their genetic capacity the ability to adapt to the changed chemistry. That's plausible. Is it likely? We don't know. We really don't know.
In addition, there might be some local things we can do that help. For instance, we were talking here about helping hatcheries for, uh, oyster larvae, where a very simple dealing with it—don't take high CO2 seawater—that would work. That would work locally. You could almost imagine making changes on a ...on a larger scale, a few square miles even. But I can't imagine making those changes on the whole of the ocean. So, it would be a matter of deciding that there were some parts that were more sensitive or more valuable and...and taking active action to change things.
[somber piano music]
[Conclusion]
It's hard to imagine that humans are burning so much fossil fuel that we've altered our atmosphere—and now our oceans—faster than has ever happened in the history of the Earth. And it's easy to feel hopeless. But I walked away from my conversations feeling that our fate—and the fate of our oceans—were not yet sealed.
We live in an ever-connected world, which affords incredible power to educate and be educated. We have the power to learn about the world around us and to listen to the scientists who are continuously deciphering our impact on it. We have the power to teach our children, to inspire change in our communities, and to support policies that are in favor of a healthy planet. We have the power to make a choice—every day—about how we live our lives.
With the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music fades out and ends]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: An Underground Answer to Greenhouse Gasses
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews Becca Ryals, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and her advisor, ecosystem scientist Whendee Silver, about carbon sequestration and Marin Carbon Project's efforts in Nicasio, California, to sequester carbon in the soil of cattle pastures.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain. [music fades]
[footsteps through grass]
The grass is crisp and yellow on John Wick and Peggy Rathmann's ranch in Nicasio, California, a short drive east from Point Reyes National Seashore. I'm following Becca Ryals, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. As we pass a group of lazy cows, European oats, bunch grasses, and thistles poke my ankles. But today, we're more interested in what's going on below our feet.
[Becca Ryals Interview]
[augering and digging sounds]
Becca Ryals: Nice to feel the fresh air, to dig around in the soil. It's a lot of manual labor involved here, but it's always really fun.
Daniel Strain: Ryals torques what looks like a giant corkscrew almost four feet into the ground. Below the surface, the dirt teems with roots, bugs and micro-organisms. This eclectic community could become California's ally in efforts to slow climate change, she says.
BR: A lot of the carbon has actually been lost from soil across the world. So, this is one way where we can just take advantage of natural processes that happen, plants growing and putting some carbon from the atmosphere into the soil.
DS: Carbon dioxide flows in and out of wild meadows and rangelands across California. But due to overgrazing and development, many grassy regions have become run-down, absorbing less and less of the gas. The owners of this ranch learned years ago
just how easily the balance could tip, Ryals says. When Wick and Rathmann first bought the property, feral cows from a previous owner had stripped the land bare.
BR: And they originally thought, “Oh, cows are bad for ecosystems. Let's remove them. Let's get rid of those cows.” But they soon found out that grazing is an integral part of that ecosystem. And what they found when they removed the cows was an invasion of coyote bush, these woody plants that you see on the landscape here.
DS: The ranch now hosts a healthy mix of grasses and some bushes, thanks to the cows I passed earlier. They're unofficial partners in the Marin Carbon Project, a coalition of university, government, and non-profit groups. Whendee Silver, Ryals' advisor at UC Berkeley, heads the team. Together, the organizations are exploring how they can encourage the growth of resilient grass communities that store more carbon for longer.
[shovel hitting a rock]
BR: Oh, no—a rock. I'm really good at finding the rocks.
DS (ON SITE): It's the experience.
BR: Too good, yeah.
DS: This ordinary-looking dirt is buzzing with the ebb and flow of carbon, Ryals says. To grow deep, the roots we see chew up sugars. Plants make those sugars from the carbon in carbon dioxide and the energy in sunlight. When grasses die, microbes in the soil gobble down their roots, carbon molecules and all. Over months or even years, these underground bacteria exhale some of what they eat back into the air. Grasslands make such potent carbon sinks because they have so much going on under the surface, says ecosystem scientist Whendee Silver.
[Whendee Silver Interview]
Whendee Silver: And that's because grasses and grasslands and rangelands tend to occur in places where there's more water loss from ecosystems—evapotranspiration—than water coming in—rainfall. And so by living in this chronically dry environment, the plants make a living by putting lots of their energy belowground into roots to hunt for water and nutrients.
DS: To super-charge this carbon-holding potential, Silver and her team laced tennis court-sized plots of land with thin layers of organic compost. She says that grass grows 50 percent better with this shot of nutrients. And based on her initial calculations, these small changes could add up. If half the rangelands in California sucked down one more ton of carbon dioxide per hectare each year, the gains could offset the state's commercial energy use.
WS: Is it worthwhile doing? Yeah, I would say it's worthwhile doing, if it works. And our preliminary results suggest that this is likely to work.
DS: But happy grasses aren't just good for carbon storage, Silver says. Taller blades mean more food for livestock and, in turn, better payouts for ranchers.
WS: Many of these approaches are common sense techniques that other ranchers have applied in the past. What we're doing now is taking what ranchers would say are their best management practices and looking at what the impacts are on soil carbon storage but also on greenhouse gas emissions.
[Conclusion]
[rustling noise and an unidentified female asking, “What depth are you at?”]
DS: Back in Nicasio, Ryals says that before the summer lull, she had no trouble spotting the plants that dined on compost.
BR: In the winter, when the rains are here, and the grass is growing, as you're driving up to the plots, you can actually see rectangles of greener plots. And those are the plots where we've added compost.
DS: Those rectangles hint at the potential lying in wait in grasslands across California. As climate change progresses, Ryals and Silver hope to find out what the green ground below their boots can do.
[music]
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
[music fades]
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Birds on the go: Climate change and California's feathered friends
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews Diana Stralberg, an ecologist with PRBO Conservation Science, about how climate change will affect birds at Point Reyes National Seashore and elsewhere in California.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Birds on the go: Climate change and California's feathered friends
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain.
[Forest ambience, bird calls]
This oak forest in Point Reyes National Seashore is noisy with songbirds. But decades from now, I may hear a different set of voices at this shady spot. Some birds may be gone, while others will be new.
California's feathered friends could be on the move, scientists say. Where birders today spot oak titmice, they may soon find spotted towhees. The culprit may be climate change.
[Interview with Diana Stralberg] Diana Stralberg: What we looked at was community change and, specifically, how different might future communities be from current communities. So, as species move independently, they kind of reshuffle.
Daniel Strain: Diana Stralberg is an ecologist with PRBO Conservation Science, a conservation research group based in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. If global temperatures continue to climb, she worries that many birds will have to leave their old homes to find new ones.
Stralberg and a team of researchers combined climate change forecasts with survey data from 60 flyers common in California to predict where these birds of tomorrow might live. The red-capped acorn woodpecker, for instance, may trek North, while the rust-colored California towhee pushes west toward the coast. Despite appearances, the woodpecker and towhee aren't fleeing the heat…at least directly.
Stralberg: A lot of people have looked at wintering ranges of birds and tracked that they're moving North as the climate gets warmer, but for these Californian birds during the breeding season, we're really assuming that it's vegetation that the birds are responding to.
[Forest sounds, stream]
Strain: For centuries, this oak forest thrived in the stable climate of coastal California. But as the region warms, these oaks may begin to inch North, following what's left of the state's cool weather. Dry-weather scrub plants like chamise will take their place. According to Stralberg's predictions, which extend to 2070, a wide range of plant communities could undergo similar shifts. For vulnerable habitats like redwood forests, which depend on chilly, wet air, these shifts could be drastic.
Stralberg: You would expect to see more scrub or more hardwood or more oak where there's now conifer, so that's a shift in the North Bay region.
Strain: And as redwood trees go, so go all the animals that depend on them for food and shelter. Birds are just one piece of this mass migration, Stralberg says.
With so many species on the go, some may never find their just-right spot. East from Point Reyes in California's Central Valley lives one such unlucky Goldilocks, the yellow-billed magpie. As the valley becomes a pressure cooker, this bird, distinguished by the big beak that gives it its name, will fly west, she predicts. There it will sit along a sliver of mountain foothills with the climate too dry for comfort on one side and too wet on the other.
Stralberg: It's been hit by a lot of other issues, particularly West Nile virus, recently. And so that would be one species of concern because it is endemic and is found nowhere else.
Strain: In the coming decades, at-risk species like this will need to keep moving to keep up with rapid fluxes in climate. But in a climate of equally rapid human growth, many won't be able to move at all.
Stralberg: The thing that we're concerned about is there is going to be a lot of moving around on the landscape when we're manipulating that same landscape so much through urban, suburban and rural residential development.
[Cars driving by]
Strain: Cars zip past Stralberg's office in Petaluma, California with ease, but to tree seedlings and crawling beetles, the city is a treacherous obstacle course. Without trees to nest in and insects to eat, even the most mobile bird species may become grounded.
Stralberg: So, if it's not climate change, it's urban development. And sometimes it's both.
Strain: Protecting birds and their communities means giving them a little elbow room, Stralberg says. Big parks like Point Reyes have room to spare, but in urban areas, many land managers have turned to habitat corridors. These corridors are strips of grassland, woodland or marsh that bisect towns like Petaluma, providing plants and animals with a safe path through the concrete.
Stralberg: Especially in California, where we have this double whammy of urban expansion and climate change, I think the best thing we can do is to embrace smart growth.
[Conclusion]
[Wetland ambience] Beside Stralberg's office, next to the zipping cars, sits Shollenberger Park. In this swath of wetland, red-winged blackbirds lounge on fence posts, while geese and egrets wallow in a pond. Many are making quick pit-stops as they wind their way down the Petaluma River.
The voices here are different here than those back in Point Reyes, but they're equally boisterous. If Californians cut down on office parks and embrace more wild channels like this, Stralberg hopes the rest of the state will stay just as noisy.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Sustainability at Point Reyes National Seashore
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2010 in which Daniel Strain interviews John Dell'Osso, Point Reyes National Seashore's Chief of Interpretation, and Sara Hammond, the park's energy manager, about efforts at Point Reyes National Seashore to make park operations more sustainable.
Credit / Author:
Daniel Strain / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Daniel Strain.
[loading laundry into a washing machine]
Every week, I run my smelly clothes through the washing machine gauntlet. But this week, I'm switching the dial from hot water to cold. [Dial clicking] With help from the website doyourpartparks.org, I've pledged to save cash and reduce my impact on climate change at the same time.
In the washing machine or on the road, we emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air annually. These gases contribute to the planet heating a little more each day, which could spur floods, droughts, and forest fires in California. It's hard to imagine that one washing machine chugging along on cold could help. But it can.
[John Dell'Osso Interview]
John Dell'Osso: You can do things that are at a smaller level, for example, changing out light bulbs or, better yet, even turning them off in a room you've just left. Little things like that can make a difference.
Daniel Strain: John Dell'Osso is Chief of Interpretation and Resource Education at Point Reyes National Seashore. In 2007, Point Reyes joined the Climate Friendly Parks Network—a coalition of 49 parks that have pledged to make small carbon cuts count.
JD: The Climate Friendly Program is a program put together by the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. And the idea behind it is to allow parks in the national park system to have the tools to, first of all, look at their carbon footprint to see where they are, what they're generating right now, and give them the actual tools to reduce that carbon footprint.
[Sara Hammond Interview]
DS: Energy Manager Sara Hammond is in charge of greenhouse gas slashing, but not burning, at Point Reyes. To meet the park's energy goals—a 15 percent drop in emissions by 2015—she's targeting excess carbon from four sources: waste, building, transportation, and other.
Sara Hammond: And our biggest category here at Point Reyes National Seashore is other. It's the methane that's emitted from the cattle that are part of the dairy ranching communities.
DS: Hammond isn't looking to get rid of the seashore's cows—they're important park residents—she just wants to limit their carbon hoof-prints. Methane digesters—devices that turn cow pies into power—could fill that need.
SH: So, we're looking at a couple of ranches where cows are being fed and milked in one central area where you could flush that waste into a lagoon and cover it, and, through the magic of chemistry, it breaks down into methane.
DS: And methane, also known as natural gas, is a clean-burning fuel. Cows, however, aren't the only sources of waste at Point Reyes. Field biologists, trail crews, and office workers make their dent, too. To target this waste, Hammond installed low-flow urinals in park bathrooms to save water, and started a recycling program to save paper, plastic, and aluminum trash. The park also put solar panels on six buildings, and Hammond plans to add them to seven more soon.
SH: We're really ramping up our solar here, and I've calculated that through the solar on those buildings, we'll be producing close to 30 percent of our load.
[electric car sounds]
DS: Point Reyes scientists can ride to study sites in style in five all-electric Toyota RAV4s. These plug-in cars get 80 miles per charge and run quietly. Louder vehicles like backhoes and bobcats refuel at the park's diesel blending pump, which mixes biodiesel with traditional diesel gas. These overhauls have made Point Reyes a greener place to work or explore.
But climate change is a global problem, one the National Park Service can't address on its own. As climate change education grows across the parks, Hammond hopes that Point Reyes' two million annual visitors will take away more than just photos during their stay.
SH: It's not park service employees alone that are causing global climate change. And we get so many visitors a year, and we have this really wonderful captive audience to say, "This is what we're doing at Point Reyes, and we real do care."
[Conclusion]
Lowering carbon emissions doesn't require a big government budget, Hammond says. Park-goers can trim waste, at a profit, in any number of ways, whether it's by driving less, recycling more, or turning down the thermostat.
[washing machine running]
I not only pledged to wash my clothes in cold water, I also reset my laptop's sleep function and switched from paper to electronic mail. According to doyourpartparks.org, in 15 days, I've saved almost $4 and 71 pounds of carbon dioxide—equal to half the energy the average American consumes each year watching TV. And, at least, now I know my new jeans won't shrink.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Daniel Strain.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore - Part 1
Part one of a The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), who has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore – Part 1
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks. Today, in a special two-part episode, we explore how climate change is impacting the California coast, including the Point Reyes National Seashore.
As one of America's greatest coastlines, Point Reyes National Seashore, part of the National Park Service, encompasses 71,000 acres, including 80 miles of unspoiled and undeveloped coast. This seashore, just one hour north of San Francisco, is home to more than one thousand species, including 32 threatened and endangered species. Millions of visitors come here every year to see the elephant breeding colonies or the historic Point Reyes Lighthouse.
But climate change has come to the California coast, potentially threatening many species that make their home here.
Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it. I drove down to the NOAA office in Pacific Grove, California to meet with Dr. Schwing and find out more.
[Interview with Frank Schwing] [Sound of car and then breaking waves]
Cassandra Brooks: I was hoping you could start by explaining what the California current is and what affect it has on the ecosystem.
Frank Schwing: The California current is the eastern most wing of a giant clockwise gyre, or circulation, that covers the North Pacific. The water we get that enters into the waters off California and the west coast really originates in the sub-arctic regions of the North Pacific. As a result, these waters are relatively cold. But they are also very rich in oxygen, nutrients and a lot of other things that really make for a productive ecosystem. As they flow south, they combine with wind patterns in spring and summer that tend to drive surface waters offshore. This process is replaced by waters that come up from depth, which we call upwelling. So, it's bringing these deep water up to the surface, again they are very productive waters, so it's the equivalent of spreading miracle grow all over the surface ocean where it can encounter plants and animals that grow there. And that's why the ecosystem is so productive off the west coast.
CB: It's difficult to know what affect climate change will have on the ecosystem off the California coast, Dr. Schwing says, but they're seeing changes in weather patterns as well as in the behavior and distribution of marine organisms.
To illustrate this point, he referred to a well-known study completed in the 1930s by scientists at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. The researchers went out and sampled tide pools off of Pacific Grove to figure out what species lived there. As expected, they found a mix of cold and warm water species. Then ten years ago, scientists went back out and re-created the study to see how the species composition changed. This time, just 60 years after the first study, they found warm-water species in much higher numbers while the number of cold-water species had dropped.
FS: Its clearly one nail in the idea that we are seeing a switch towards warmer water species in the California current.
CB: So, what does that mean for some of the bigger species, some of the fisheries say or marine mammals?
FS: It could be quite significant. The ones that can swim might start moving north. Species that are less tolerant of warmer waters, such as salmon, may be more seriously affected in a negative way by climate change. On the other hand, we may see more warm water species, albacore and tunas and other fish like that showing up in our waters.
CB: Do your time scales go back far enough to discern whether these changes are actually human induced or just part of natural cycles?
FS: The good observational record goes back about 50 to 60 years. And we do see some fairly robust trends in the record. Definitely, we've seen conditions are now warmer than they were half a century ago, another very important change comes back to upwelling. Overall, we are seeing more upwelling than 50 years ago but a lot of it seems to be occurring later in the year.
CB: But if upwelling is increasing is that overall a good thing for most species? Does it mean there are more nutrients in the water?
FS: Because it appears to be occurring later in the growing season it's the equivalent of planting your garden but not fertilizing it for two months, it's not going to do very well. That's the problem a lot of these species have, by the time the upwelling finally kicks in its too late for them, their eggs don't do well, the offspring starve. We've seen some significant problems like that with a number of species.
[Conclusion] We've certainly seen changes in the upwelling currents in recent years off the Northern California coast. Thanks to the work of coastal oceanographers like Dr. Frank Schwing who study this phenomenon and its effect on marine plants and animals, managers and policy makers will be better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change in the future.
Stay tuned for the second episode of the Natural Laboratory to find out more about how climate change is affecting the Point Reyes National Seashore, the potential for dead zones off of California and ocean acidification. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore - Part 2
Part two of a The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews Dr. Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (also known as NOAA), who has been studying the California current, trying to discern how climate change is impacting the current and the ecosystem which depends on it.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Climate Change and the California Current at Point Reyes National Seashore – Part 2
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks. Today, in a special two-part episode, we explore how climate change is impacting the California coast, including the Point Reyes National Seashore.
In part one we discussed the how climate change and ocean warming might be impacting the California current and the animals that live there. Here we continue our conversation with oceanographer Dr. Frank Schwing about the impacts of climate change on the Point Reyes National Seashore, as well as the potential for dead zones and ocean acidification.
[Interview with Frank Schwing] Cassandra Brooks: So, Dr. Schwing, I was hoping you could tell us how climate change and changes in the California upwelling currents might specifically affect the Point Reyes region? I know there are a lot of elephant seal haul out sites, and a lot of great white sharks, and many animals specific to this place. Can you comment on how some of these changes will affect them?
Frank Schwing: While climate change is a global process the impacts on populations or organisms really occur at very local scales. Could be things like changing in the time of upwelling, and Point Reyes is a very large upwelling area. If we see delays there, it could be particularly sensitive to those changes compared to other areas say off of Washington or southern California where the seasonal cycle of upwelling is not as strong. In terms of marine mammals again one of the things we are probably going to see are these big shifts, geographic shifts in their distributions. So their traditional haul out areas are associated with a geographic feature like a point it may be at some point that the conditions are no longer right for them to return to those spots and they'll be seeking other locations for their reproduction or other life history activities that may be further north.
CB: What is the potential for us to have dead zones here off of California due to the circulation changes you talked about?
FS: Well we actually are getting some dead zones here. We are seeing some interesting changes in the oxygen levels through the California current. We're seeing two things that seem to be occurring. One is that climate change seems to be slowing down the overall clockwise circulation of the Pacific Ocean. So, we are seeing less of that subarctic water and it's losing the battle with the subtropical water. When you combine that with the upwelling we are getting it's bringing that low oxygen water much closer to the surface than we've seen before. So now we are seeing fairly close to the surface at times, what we call hypoxic water, water that is very difficult for most gilled animals to survive in.
An area we haven't talked about much is ocean acidification. We know very little about what the impacts of this are going to be. But recent surveys have shown an alarming trend towards higher acidity in the waters off the California current and again because of upwelling these acidic waters are showing up very close to the surface.
CB: Dr. Schwing said these acidic surface waters could be really detrimental in the formation of animals that are calcium carbonate based since carbonate can't form when you reach below a certain pH.
FS: So that's an area we are really concerned about in terms of being one of the consequences of climate change.
CB: Despite these potential impacts of climate change, are you fairly hopeful that most of the species here off California will be robust to survive the next century of climate change?
FS: I think most animals will be pretty robust, whether or not they remain California animals is another question. But both with natural variations in the oceans as well as things driven by human activities, there will be winners and losers. Some of the animals don't fare so well there will be other animals that will be happy to come in and take their place. The question is whether those animals that are replacing them will be appropriate for the ones that will benefit the various human activities in the ocean. Not only economically, but socially, through recreation and just the intrinsic connections we have with the ocean, living close to it for so many years.
Conclusion [Sound of footsteps and then breaking waves]
I walked out of Dr. Schwing's office, and out to the beach just across the street, wondering what the future will hold for the California Coast and all the species that live there. One thing is clear, having protected places, like Point Reyes National Seashore, will at least provide a stable place for creatures while they adjust to these tremendous changes.
This is Cassandra Brooks with the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center at Point Reyes National Seashore.
The Natural Laboratory Podcast: Fishing for the Humboldt Squid
A The Natural Laboratory podcast produced by the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center in 2009 in which Casandra Brooks interviews four marine biologists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station who are studying the Humboldt squid in central California's coastal waters.
Credit / Author:
Casandra Brooks / Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center
The Natural Laboratory Podcast Transcript: Fishing for the Humboldt Squid
[Introduction] This is the Natural Laboratory, a podcast exploring science for Bay Area National Parks. I'm Cassandra Brooks.
[music]
Today, I am out with scientists and educators off Monterey Bay searching for the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), also known as the Jumbo squid. Or in Mexico, where the fish are caught commercially, they call them “Diablo rojo”—the red devil.
These voracious deep-water predators, which can grow to up to ten feet long and swim 24 kilometers per hour, are new arrivals to the central California coast. Scientists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station are studying the squid, trying to understand why they've moved into the northeast Pacific coast and what affect they might have on the local ecosystem.
I join the Stanford crew for a fishing adventure, along with scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service, local fishermen and educators with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
[Interview with Erik Larsen] Erik Larsen: So I'm Erik Larsen, captain of the research vessel Fulmar and we just left Monterey heading to a point about four miles southwest of cypress point off of Carmel and we are going to stop the boat and set up for some squid jigging in about 700 meters and see what happens.
Today it's a little windy and a little bit of swell, 6- to 7-foot swell, supposed to get to 25 knots of wind, but right now, it's not too bad, a little lumpy, of course that's just me talking (he laughs).
[Interview with William Gilly] Cassandra Brooks: I'm standing on the back of the boat with professor William Gilly, who is spearheading the Humboldt squid tagging program as part of Hopkins tagging of Pacific predators program.
We are perched on the side of the boat, holding sturdy fishing rods outfitted with large spiked glow-in-the-dark jigs. We drop the jigs a couple hundred feet down in the water and wait, hoping to trick a squid into biting.
Humboldt squid feed in frenzies, snatching anything they can find in the water, including a variety of different fish species, but occasionally other squid that get in the way.
They seize prey with long tentacles covered with rings of prickly serrated teeth, which they use to bring the prey up to their mouth where they devour it with their large sharp beak.
If the squid are down here and actively feeding, they're sure to latch onto the jig.
Gilly's research team uses satellite tags to record an animal's movements underwater in space and time. Once affixed to a squid, the tag tells the researchers how deep the animals are diving, where they are traveling to and where they prefer to live. Historically, the Humboldt squid were seldom found further north than Baja California, Mexico.
Then with the 1997/98 El Nino, the squid came en masse and have maintained a fairly regular presence since then.
Cassandra Brooks: So, why do you think they are here?
William Gilly: Well I guess there is stuff for them to eat. [chuckles] It's not clear why they seem to be expanding their presence to more northern latitudes, maybe there are too many in the south and they need growing room. But they seem to be establishing themselves in areas that in recent history have been not subject to their presence. Like, Monterey Bay, and they seem to be getting established off the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, a lot around Vancouver and the Queen Charlotte Islands.
CB: Does it seem like they are here to stay?
WG: Well they have been here more or less stably since 2002 and unless something changes to make what they are eating go away, I think they will probably be here for a while. That's my guess
[Interview with Julie Stewart] CB: Julie Stewart is a graduate student in Gilly's lab who is looking at oceanographic properties that may correlate with the squid's seasonal invasions and migrations.
CB: So, you think it's a combination of climate change and ecosystem changes?
Julie Stewart: I think so, there has to be, they have to be able to get here to begin with, so climate change is providing a route, but once they are here, they have to be able to stay here. Physical oceanographic conditions have to be correct and they have to be able to find food, they have to be able to avoid predators and to be able to reproduce. Which is a big thing.
The big question is establishment. Is this thing able to establish itself, what is it eating, what is it doing?
If these squid are going somewhere else to spawn and each generation is re-invading and re-establishing itself then that's an interesting question, but right now we just don't know.
CB: So, the satellite tags will actually give you information as to whether they are just migrating here to feed and then returning back south?
JS: That's the goal.
[Interview with Danna Staaf] CB: To find out if the squid are reproducing here in California, Danna Staaf, a graduate student in Gilly's lab, has been searching for squid babies, or what she calls paralarvae.
CB: So, we were just out here doing a plankton trawl.
Danna Staaf: That's right. That's one of the main ways we use to look at where the squid babies are and what the squid babies might be eating. It gives you an ecosystem perspective of what's available for them.
We are up here in California in cold water, which is not where they spawn, at least not where we think they spawn. We know that Humboldt squid spawn in warm waters off Mexico, and Central America and further south than that, but we have not yet found any baby Humboldt squid in California. But we keep looking, because as waters get warmer and conditions change, they might well start spawning here. We want to be the fi rst to know. I do think it's too cold for them (it's too cold for me!).
[Conclusion] We continue fishing for the rest of the day, but didn't find any adult or larvae Humboldt squid.
Gilly and his team aren't sure why there were scarce today, but they'll be out again soon fishing in nearby waters.
For the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center, I'm Cassandra Brooks.
Cassandra Brooks interviews Ivano Aiello, a geological oceanographer at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, about how we burn ancient life to power our civilization and some of the issues that result from fossil fuel pollution.
More than a hundred thousand marine species build their bodies using calcium carbonate. This incredible diversity of life evolved over millions of years, as animals figured out ways to pull calcium and carbonate ions from the water to build shells and skeletons. But all of this is changing. Our addiction to fossil fuels and the billions of tons of carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere each year may be undoing millions of years of evolution in a geological blink of time.
Daniel Strain interviews Becca Ryals, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and her advisor, ecosystem scientist Whendee Silver, about carbon sequestration and Marin Carbon Project's efforts in Nicasio, California, to sequester carbon in the soil of cattle pastures.
Daniel Strain interviews Diana Stralberg, an ecologist with PRBO Conservation Science, about how climate change will affect birds at Point Reyes National Seashore and elsewhere in California.
Daniel Strain interviews John Dell'Osso, Point Reyes National Seashore's Chief of Interpretation, and Sara Hammond, the park's energy manager, about efforts at Point Reyes National Seashore to make park operations more sustainable.
Casandra Brooks interviews four marine biologists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station who are studying the Humboldt squid in central California's coastal waters.
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