Teachers get hands-on look at climate change

Sandy Naas scans the North Fork landscape with binoculars looking for birds and other animals in Glacier National Park. She’s a high school teacher from Wisconsin. Last winter, at 2 a.m. in the morning, as another snowstorm blew in around her house, she started surfing the Web.

“I decided I wanted to do something fun and get out of here,” she said.

A few clicks and a few months later, she was in Glacier Park with a group of teachers from across the country studying climate change.

It was part of a joint effort by the National Park Service and the Glacier Institute to give teachers a hands-on look at the impacts of climate change in the Park. The weeklong course was funded by an NPS grant. The teachers paid only for their travel.

Naas, who teaches high school natural resources, was learning a lot along the way. Her personal worry is the world’s food supply as the human population grows and climate change impacts farm lands around the world.

But on this day she’s in the woods with a half-dozen other teachers learning about invasive plants and how they could impact wildlife diets from Park ecologist Dawn LaFleur.

Park officials are currently battling 17 major invasive plant species. Some have been around for decades, like the ubiquitous and nasty spotted knapweed. Park managers worry that as climate change progressively changes the snowpack in the Park, invasive plants could gain a stronghold over non-native species. Invasive species have a common trait, LaFleur noted — they’re very adaptable and very pervasive.

One invasive plant the Park is being extra vigilant about is cheatgrass. The non-native plant gets its name from going to seed twice in a season and cheating the system.

It’s also highly adapted to fire and spreads rapidly after a blaze. One national park LaFleur recently visited had a few acres of cheatgrass prior to a wildfire. After the fire passed through, there were tens of thousands of acres of cheatgrass. The plant is well suited to fire. It dries out faster and remains susceptible to fire one to two months longer than native grasses.

Cheatgrass can also take over native grasslands, and while it is eaten by ungulates, it’s not a preferred food. Fortunately very little cheatgrass is found in the Park now, and when crews find it, they pull it out.

Robert Bremner teaches wood shop at Browning High School. Even though he lives near the Park, he didn’t realize the extent of the weed problem there.

“I didn’t know we had that many invasive species,” he said. “In wood shop we talk about conservation. Trees are important to the industry.”

The teachers toured various regions of the Park, from wildfire regions in the North Fork to Logan Pass and Avalanche Lake. They stayed at the Glacier Institute field camp at Big Creek and came from as far away as Alabama and Washington, D.C.