BRIAN SMITHERS: The idea of a seed landing in a spot
and being adapted to grow in that spot for hundreds
or thousands of years.
It sees really cold days, really warm days, dry days.
Lightning strikes all around it.
And it doesn't move.
It doesn't budge.
It's perfectly adapted to just keep going.
It's almost like looking at the last thousand years of weather
all encapsulated in one sculpture.
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My name is Brian Smithers.
I am a research assistant professor at Montana State
University in Bozeman, Montana, and I study forests and forest
response to climate change.
I do a lot of my work here in the White Mountains, which
is where we're standing now.
It's the westernmost mountain range
of what we call the Great Basin.
For forest, it's extremely dry.
My overall interest is in these individuals
that live on the edge of what's possible.
Trees are often living at that extreme.
Here in the White Mountains, it's just the two species--
limber pine and bristlecone pine.
This is a bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva.
They all grow in these pretty rough conditions--
high elevations, dry forests.
And they all grow for a long time.
Bristlecone pine's famous for having
individuals that are the oldest non-clonal organisms on Earth.
We're talking upwards of 5,000 years
that an individual can live.
Key to these individuals longevity
is that they have really slow growth.
So they've got incredibly dense wood,
which enables them to withstand a hundred mile an hour winds,
which are common at this elevation.
Insects or other things like rust
aren't really able to get a foothold in bristlecone pine
because they just can't get into the wood.
But the coolest thing is their ability
to do what's called bark stripping where they will just
allow parts of the tree to die back.
This is the patriarch tree.
We're here in the Patriarch Grove of the White Mountains.
And it's possibly the most massive Great Basin bristlecone
pine in its entire range.
And so it's been around for quite possibly longer
than the entirety of Christianity,
never mind Western civilization.
We had one main trunk that was the tree until something pretty
catastrophic happened, looks like maybe
a couple hundred years ago.
But this one small branch right here stayed alive.
And now that has grown to become the main part of the tree.
They produce a ton of seed, but the vast majority
will just get eaten by chipmunks or ground squirrels.
Every once in a while, maybe one might just find a nice spot
to land and germinate.
But even those will almost certainly die.
But if you live for say 3,000 years,
all you need is one or two of those individuals
over that time to make it.
It is the definition of perseverance.
It's why I got into these trees.
I'm a community ecologist.
And so for me, climate change is serving as a great way
to look at how species colonize new areas.
How do species compete?
One of the predictions of climate change
is that species will move upslope in response
to climate warming.
But a lot of these stands of bristlecone pine
are already on mountaintops.
And so if they have to move upslope to keep pace
with climate change, certainly some populations of these trees
will be lost.
And so we formed a chapter, GLORIA Great Basin,
which is looking at 29 peaks that we monitor
to look at how the species ranges are changing
or will change over time.
So what we did is to count what's
going on on the landscape.
We identified all the seedlings to species
and then measured their distance from tree line.
Our research has showed about a 20 meter
vertical upslope average increase over the last 50
years.
New individuals are getting established
beyond the current range.
This is happening very slowly for bristlecone pine
versus limber pine.
Limber pine is also a high elevation pine.
It's long lived.
And what we found was that most of that tree line advance
is made up of young limber pine trees moving in.
Those are all young juvenile limber pine,
cannot find an adult limber pine anywhere near here.
And that was a bit of a surprise.
Limber pine, which typically grows a little bit further
down slope, it's actually jumping right
over the bristlecone pine and charging upslope.
Limber pine does seem to be able to take advantage
of this rapid climate change probably
mostly because limber pine has a dispersal advantage
over bristlecone pine.
The Clark's nutcracker, it harvests seeds
from both limber pine and bristlecone pine
and buries them underground all over the landscape.
They very much prefer the seeds of limber pines
versus bristlecone pines.
There's this entire area of new, undeveloped real estate
that is now climatically available.
Limber pine is just able to get there more quickly.
At the lower end of the species range,
so lower in elevation, that combination of warming
and then effective drying, trees will die.
And in fact, we appear to just be
starting to see some of that taking effect.
These are really slow, long term processes at this point.
However, every year is a new chance for young individuals
to establish or not.
And so we can make a lot of predictions
about how the species is going to go forward
based on what's happening in the last 15, 20
years of the young trees.
As a species, they'll have to make some adjustments.
Bristlecone pine has weathered many climate changes.
They've been getting punched in the face
their entire species history and even in some ways thrive
in the face of adversity.
But whether they can make those adjustments in their range
fast enough to keep up with climate change,
I think that's the question.
LUKE GROSKIN: This is Luke Groskin, video producer
for Science Friday.
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