From social trails to heavy rain events, the summits in Acadia National Park are experiencing a lot of degradation. In this episode, we’ll discover how a backpack full of dirt can help bring life back to Acadia’s mountains.

Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park: https://schoodicinstitute.org/

Episode 1_FINAL TRANSCRIPT

Catherine Devine 00:05 Hi, everyone, welcome back to Sea to Trees. This episode opens with a little story about one of the best walks I've ever been on. Let me set the scene. It was late winter in the high desert, which means it was around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I was about to head down one of those secret paths not advertised to tourists. As these things tend to go, it was my friend's father who lives in the area, who told me about this secret spot. Though, to be honest, I'm not so sure how secret it was considering I found some more detailed instructions online. As the instructions said, I followed the path until I saw a small gently worn trail off to the right. I turned right down the skinny path and followed it. It got narrower and narrower until it opened up to the most serene looking bunch of natural hot springs I've ever seen. It was so cool. Spa-like private, and the insider nature of it all give me a small rush of adrenaline. And the best part was that it was secret. A discovery off the beaten path, an adventure. It's the best, right? Well, it's actually kind of the worst. And I wouldn't have done it if I knew the gravity of my actions. That off the beaten path I took. It's pretty harmful. It's called the social trail. And you've probably made one too. You're listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast that tells the stories of the science happening in and around Acadia National Park. From the rocky shoreline to the evergreen forests to the granite mountain tops. The second season of the show seeks to answer the question, what does it mean to conserve in the face of climate change? Social trails, unlike official trails, these users created paths form over time cutting through protected habitat. Once the vegetation is worn down, it starts to look like an official trail, which invites more foot traffic, and the cycle continues. They've become managerial nuisances for national parks all across the country, including Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine, a place that's been experiencing the effects of an especially brutal cocktail of both social trails and more frequent heavy rain events.

Chris Nadeau 02:34 All the mountain summits in the Northeast are absolutely amazing places because of that, because they're so amazing, right hundreds, if not millions of people come up to the summits each year. And that has an impact on the vegetation up here, right. And so, we see a lot of degradation. And if we continue to let that happen, then we'll just see more and more degradation. And then with heavy rain events like we get now and climate change, that erosion just continues to happen even more. And so, it's really our duty to try to figure out how we can restore these places so that the next generation of people will be able to come here and see these amazing places and see these really unique plants that really many of them only occur on mountain summits in Acadia. So, keeping them here is super-duper important.

Catherine Devine 03:20 That's Chris Nadeau, the climate change adaptation scientist at Schoodic Institute. He's talking about the impacts of social trials on the summits in Acadia National Park. Basically, social trials plus heavy rain events equal lots of soil erosion and loss of vegetation. And this isn't a projection. Acadia is experiencing the effects right now. The Summits were once lush and green and lichen soaked. Now they have more bare rock granite and loose pebbles. It's pretty drab looking. So far, the efforts to minimize and reverse this degradation haven't been too successful.

Chris Nadeau 03:55 The park noticed that there was a lot of degradation of the vegetation on Acadia's mountain summits. And so, they tried to start roping off some areas to see if just keeping people off those areas would help the vegetation come back. But what we found is that the vegetation doesn't come back.

Catherine Devine 04:10 And the reason the vegetation doesn't come back? It's all about soil. On a basic level, what soil does is it essentially provides a home for plants to root grow and obtain nutrients. Plant roots collect nutrients held in the soil. The roots then reach towards water sources and pull the water towards the stem and leaves. And since plants uptake nutrients through water, bacteria and fungi in the soil break nutrients down so they become water soluble for the plants to use. Soil also anchors plants, giving them something to grab hold up and stabilize. So yeah, there's a lot going on in the soil. I don't think it gets enough credit. But basically, what's going on in the summits of Acadia is that there isn't enough soil for vegetation to grow in. Yeah, as I said it's because of social trails and heavy rain events. Knowing this Schoodic Institute and partners including friends of Acadia and NPS set out to find a solution.

Chris Nadeau 05:07 And so, about seven years ago, the Schoodic Institute and other partners, including the National Park Service and native plant trust, started some experiments to try to understand how can we restore vegetation on mountain summits. And we really found three things. One roping off areas doesn't work. Two, we needed to bring soil to the summit, and then three, if we bring the soil, the plants will just come, they'll colonize the soil that we bring up to the summit on their own.

Catherine Devine 05:35 I found a lot of hope and what Chris said, bring the soil and the plants will come. Give nature the space and resources to do its thing, and the vegetation will vegetate. Easy, right? We just need to get some fertile soil to the tops of the mountains and we're all good. Problem solved. Vegetation will grow again. In theory, this sounds fairly straightforward, but in practice, it's a bit of a different story.

06:03 **sound of people sanitizing soil**

Catherine Devine 06:12 That's Alex Carey. She's the restoration research associate at Schoodic Institute. She's spent countless hours sterilizing dirt to aid in one of the summit restoration projects at Schoodic. When I first heard that Alex was spending many hours sanitizing dirt. I was a little confused. Up until that point, I thought dirt was always well dirty. Let me explain. Since the dirt came from outside the park, it needs to be heated up to at least 180 degrees to kill any fungus or invasive plant seeds that could be damaging to the park. After the dirt gets sanitized, it needs to make its way to the summits of three different mountains in Acadia, Cadillac, Sargent and Penobscot. Getting soil up Cadillac Mountain is a pretty easy task, because there's a road to the top. But Sergeant and Penobscot have no roads, just trails, which makes this entire process a whole lot more complicated. So, the researchers had a brainstorm. They had to figure out how to transport a whole lot of soil over 1000 feet up to the tops of these mountains. They had a few options to consider a big one being using a helicopter to fly the soil to the summits. But that came with its own set of logistical challenges, mainly due to funding. But then, Chris Nadeau along with friends of Acadia and the National Park Service had a better idea. A soil hike. An event that would call on community members to carry some of the sterilized soil on their backs up Sargent and Penobscot mountains. They called it Save Our Summits. There'd be three waves of hikers, one at 7am, one at 8am and one at 9am. Everyone would get a black sack to fill with the weight of soil of their choosing. Hikers would fill their sacks with sterilized dirt at the base of the mountain, place their sack in their backpack and hike approximately two miles to the summit of either Sargent or Penobscot mountain, hikers' choice. I showed up to the event around 6am. The turnout was already surprisingly big. As I said the event was a joint partnership between Schoodic Institute, the National Park Service and Friends of Acadia, there had to be at least around 40 people working the event alone. I hiked up early with some of Schoodic Institute's restoration crew and NPS employees. They had to place signs along the trail and at the summit before the first wave of hikers started. The hike was much harder and steeper than I anticipated. It had rained the night before, so some of the rocks were pretty slick. About 45 minutes later, we made it and at about 8am the volunteers started rolling in. I headed over to Sargent Mountain to see how the turnout had been going. Emma Lanning, a biological science technician for the National Park Service was staffing the station.

Emma Lanning 09:50 So far, it's pretty early in the day. So, we've only had a couple people I think four people up here so far, but they carried a lot of soil. I think the first person had like 30 pounds of soil in their backpack. So, everyone signed up beforehand. So, it was kind of a mix of locals and people visiting, even people who work for the park, Schoodic Institute, or some of our partner organizations on their day off helping out.

Catherine Devine 10:15 One volunteer said it was his third trip. Some of the volunteers were just kids.

Young Volunteer 10:23 It was really fun, it was difficult. All dyadic take several breaks. But I really like the honors of bringing oil up to help get planning on vegetation.

Catherine Devine 10:39 In the end, more than 1500 pounds of soil was transported from base to summit, and absolute success. But they're not quite done yet.

Chris Nadeau 10:50 We got 1500 pounds up during the Save Our Summits event with 72 volunteers. But we didn't get all the soil up during that time. And so, we've been doing smaller events. You know, every couple of weeks or so will take up a volunteer group. And we've been able to move, you know, last event we did I think had 30 people, give or take 30 people, and we got up another 500 pounds, we need three or four more trips like that, before the fall. To get it all up.

Catherine Devine 11:19 Do you find people are fairly eager?

Chris Nadeau 11:22 Yeah, it's been amazing. I mean, people just really want to help the park. I mean, they come here from far away, because the parks are so amazing, and they love it. And then the locals just also a lot of them really love the park. And so, they've just been super eager to help. And in fact, we have to hold people, people want to take way more weight than we're comfortable letting them carry up the mountain. And we have to kind of tell people like, you know, please take a little less, because they're worried about your safety. And so, it's just amazing to see how much people want to help out. So yeah, we have many, many people asking us when they can do it again.

Catherine Devine 11:56 It seems like Chris and his team will have no problem getting all the soil up there, which is great. But what happens next, how is this soil put to work? Chris says the next few weeks of the project is all about mapping. And then a few weeks later, it's all about my favorite fruit, coconuts. That doesn't sound right, let me explain. To prevent the soil from just blowing off the mountain. Chris and his team are covering it with a coconut mesh fiber. So maybe not coconuts. Exactly. But coconut fiber, slightly less delicious. Let's hear what Chris has to say about it.

Chris Nadeau 12:37 So, in the rest of the summer, we'll be mapping areas that are degraded up on their summits, so Sargent, Cadillac and Penobscot mountains. And so we'll be looking for these areas where there was a nice island of vegetation in the past, but now you can see a trail that goes right through the middle of it. Or you can see an edge that people have walked on the vegetation, and now the soil has washed away from that edge. So, we're looking to repair those edges and, or those trails. And the idea is really to get that vegetation back but to stop further damage, right, because once a trail is made through the middle of an island of vegetation, then we get a heavy rain event and the edges of that trail or road and the trail gets a little bigger and the vegetation area gets a little smaller than next year, same thing and eventually the island will just be gone. So, we want to fix those spots so that we don't get further degradation in these areas. So, in the fall, once we kind of know where these degraded areas are, we'll be spreading soil to try to fix these areas. And so we'll go to a spot that, for example, has a little trail, we'll place about an inch of the soil that we've carried up there an inch deep over the entire trail area. And then we'll cover that with this coconut mesh fiber that holds the soil on the mountain until some vegetation can grow in, in the soil to hold it on. And then we'll just let that bat grow and naturally get recolonized.

Catherine Devine 14:02 But the experiment doesn't end there. The plan is to plant seeds on half of the summit soil plots and leave the other half of them as is, then Chris and the team will be able to deduce which strategy produces more vegetation. Does vegetation grow best when the soil is left alone in the coconut fiber? Or does it need a little support with the addition of seeds? Similar revegetation projects have been done before. The vast majority of restoration projects tend to leave out one familiar fuzzy ground cover... Moss,. Mosses and lichens are a huge component of the ecology on Acadia summits. But how do you restore them?

Chris Nadeau 14:43 Often how they're restored is you just dig up an entire mat so like a five foot by five-foot area of moss and lichen mat and just move that to a different place and pop it down. But that's not something we can do because we'd be degrading one area basically to restore another and so we're trying some four methods to restore mosses and lichens in these places. And one potential method is just to collect a cookie cutter size piece of moss and lichen from a natural area, grind it up, and then just spread those ground up moss and lichen propagules on to the soil. Another option is the same thing, collect a cookie cutter size section of moss and like and grind it up, put it into water and make like moss and lichens slurry. And then you just spray that slurry out on the soil. So, we'll be potentially testing a couple of those methods. And we're testing those in the lab now. But I think in the fall, we'll be applying one of those methods in some of the applications. And one of the really cool things about that, so one of the big threats up there for this restoration is climate change. And so, things are, you know, getting a lot hotter, obviously, we're also seeing longer periods between rain events. And so, we'll get a heavy rain event and then we'll get nothing for a really long time, a week or two and then we'll get another heavy rain event. And plants really struggled to survive in that dry period between rain events when it's really hot. And so, we're worried that we'll do all this work for the restoration. But plants will just die in restoration pots because of climate change. But we're hoping maybe mosses and lichens can alleviate that stress. And so, one thing mosses and lichens do really well is they hold moisture in the soil during dry periods. And so, if we can restore mosses and lichens, maybe they'll be able to hold moisture in the soil and allow other plants to persist in these really dry periods and make our restoration a lot more successful.

Catherine Devine 16:39 When producing this episode, I often had this feeling that restoration projects are running on this sort of ever quickening climate treadmill, trying to keep ecosystems as they are, while the effects of climate change compound. I took my concerns to Ivan Fernandez, a soil scientist at the University of Maine, hoping he could provide some optimism. What is there to do to save a lot of this climate research and restoration efforts from this Sisyphean like fate?

Ivan Fernandez 17:10 I look at it through a lens of we're experiencing a lot of change. And of course, a lot of it is not good. But there's also just a chunk of the not good. That is kind of not preferred, meaning we well, where you're working, you know, we want Acadia to be the Acadia that we've always known and loved. And the reality is, we will never have the 20th century climate system again. And so, what do we want when we think about restoration, and resilience and adaptation? And all the kinds of stuff we do under those umbrellas. Part of being optimistic is sort of questioning ourselves on what we are resilient to? And is it realistic? And so, in a lot of the conservation world, that's been a challenge, because it's more about preserving function than form. It's more about preserving a system that has plants and birds and butterflies and nutrient cycling and hydrologic, you know, all of those things, not this specific species that always was in this specific position. Because that was in a specific climate that we'll never see again. And so, some of it, of course, yes, will persist because we're deep within the envelope of that sort of the habitat niche of those species, but in others, were at the edge of it, or were beyond it. And so, we're wrestling with, in some cases, we’re wrestling with recreating or preserving a system that is simply doomed but doomed in only certain characteristics. And if we rely on the science to, you know, to inform our best efforts, and we embrace the kind of system that will be resilient in the future, and work to preserve that, then we should be optimistic that there's something we can do, instead of just sitting here and watching it all just sort of washed away. And, and so there's one part of that sort of sense of hopelessness, that I reject in the sense of, there's a lot we can do. It's just we have to have a mindset of what's the realistic goals, the more appropriate goals in light of the reality of what we know is taking place in an ecosystem change.

Catherine Devine 20:11 I really like Ivan's outlook. It's not the most soothing outlook I've heard. But I think it's one of the more honest projections. And it's extremely refreshing, especially in a current public discourse that often leans on hyperbolic claims that tend to contribute to feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness in face of climate change. I definitely struggle with climate anxiety and feelings of helplessness myself. I mean, who doesn't? But then I think of Save Our Summits, and how many people turned out to help, even though it was hard and long and grueling. People want to do something, and when they can, they show up in droves. And that is something to be optimistic about. As for Chris and his team, they'll wait and see. It'll take a few years to gather any conclusive evidence about their studies. But this information will give us a great shot at building a more resilient future for Acadia, Maine and the world. Thanks so much for listening to Sea to Trees, a podcast from Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. Acadia National Park is on traditional lands of the Wabanaki, people of the dawn. Stay tuned for our next episode. It's a wild bird chase. A big thanks to this episode's guests, Chris Nadeau, Ivan Fernandez, Alex Carey, and Emma Lanning. Sea to Trees is hosted, produced and edited by me. Catherine Devine, Catherine Wang, provided production support. And Catherine Schmitt is our senior editor. Our music was written by Eric Green, performed with Ryan Curless and Stu Mahan and recorded at North Blood studios in Midcoast, Maine. The cover art was created by Sarah Luchini. Sea to Trees is generously sponsored by the Cathy and Jim Gero early career fellowship, the National Park Foundation, National Park Service and Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, inspiring science, learning, and community for a changing world.