Science And Practical Solutions To Support Ecological Restoration

Dr. Elise Gornish discusses her research on restoration and weed management strategies to minimize the effects of changing climatic conditions - especially warming temperatures and decreasing precipitation. Her work focuses on designing realistic restoration strategies and solutions that are both financially and logistically feasible.

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The Gornish Lab

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Transcript

Emile Elias: Welcome to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the USDA southwest climate hub 

Sarah LeRoy: and the DOI Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center, or Southwest CASC, operated by the USGS. I'm Sarah LeRoy, Research Coordinator for the Southwest CASC. 

Emile Elias: And I'm Emile Elias, Director of the Southwest Climate Hub. Here we highlight stories to share the most recent advances in climate science, weather, and climate adaptation and innovative practices to support resilient landscapes and communities.

Sarah LeRoy: We believe that sharing some of the most innovative, forward thinking, and creative climate science and adaptation will strengthen our collective ability to respond to even the most challenging impacts of climate change in one of the hottest and driest regions of the world.

The contents of this podcast are for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as endorsement for any of the products, technologies, or strategies discussed. 

Today we are talking with Dr. Elise Gornish, an Associate Professor and Cooperative Extension Specialist in Ecological Restoration at the University of Arizona, and is a Southwest CASC Co Investigator.

Her research focuses on restoration and weed management strategies. to minimize the effects of climate change, especially warming temperatures and decreasing precipitation. She focuses on designing realistic restoration strategies and solutions that are both financially and logistically feasible.

Welcome, Elise. Thank you so much for joining us today. So let's just start at the beginning and talk about ecological restoration. How would you define ecological restoration and how has the field evolved over time? 

Elise Gornish: Yeah, so, thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here. So, ecological restoration, sort of the formal definition is the recuperation of an area that's been damaged or destroyed.

So basically, when an environment is damaged or destroyed and that can occur through sort of direct human involvement, like we put a parking lot on a forest, or through sort of the indirect, I guess, effects of humans or maybe something natural like a volcanic eruption or, or a wildfire or something like that.

Things change in the environment and ecological restoration is essentially the process that attempts to get the environment back to the way it was before that event happened, right? And so, ecological restoration as sort of a research field is fairly new, I guess, in the sort of grand scheme of things in ecology.

It's only in the last, like, 30 or 40 years that it's been gaining popularity. And really, in the beginning, people thought about ecological restoration as very much getting things back exactly the way they were. So, getting the species that were there before, and the numbers that were there. But nowadays people are much more flexible kind of in how they consider ecological restoration in the sense of, you know, if you have multiple drought kind of back to back and species are extirpated and, and plant species are dying, so you've got lots of changes in who you're seeing out on a landscape.

Restoring back to the way things were before those droughts happened might not be the most effective strategy. It's essentially The climate is changing in a way that it's just going to be hotter and drier. So if it's just going to be hotter and drier, getting species back on the landscape that were there 50 years ago, so they're native, but they are not tolerant of this new hotter, drier climate, is that the most effective way to do things? So now we're much more flexible in kind of how we think about repairing or attempting to restore a landscape. Also, I think nowadays folks are, are more accommodating to kind of considering multiple ecosystem services, restoring multiple ecosystem sources.

So back in the day, ecological restoration was largely like getting plants or getting animals back on the landscape, so just kind of increasing cover, right? But nowadays we think about, okay, how do we arrest erosion and how do we re establish soil microbial communities and how do we get livestock forage back in the landscape.

So all these different and sometimes competing ecosystem services we need to rejuvenate because we use these landscapes and these landscapes support multiple ecosystem services. So that's how people are thinking about it today. 

Sarah LeRoy: Thank you, Elise, for that wonderful answer of how we're thinking about ecological restoration today.

And so I wanted to focus a little bit more on your work, which is focused on novel approaches to ecological restoration. So can you talk about some of your projects that explore the less common approaches to restoration? 

Elise Gornish: Yeah, so I like, I use the term novel for restoration, kind of the work we do, but basically what we're doing is we don't tend to really come up with anything new in my lab.

What we try to do is leverage approaches that people have been using for a very long time, sometimes not within a restoration context per se. And there, therein lies the novelty. But leveraging things that people have been using for a very, very long time with success, and try to formalize that approach.

So what I mean by that is this, for example, people have been using rocks for a very long time. There's evidence in Arizona that people have been using rocks to move water and modify landscapes for at least 4, 000 years. They've probably been used for much longer than that. So people have been using rocks to modify the flow of water and the flow of organic material for a very long time and with a lot of success.

And so, if nowadays can we leverage what we know works to modify landscapes at one level for a different sort of goal that is reestablishing maybe plant communities on a landscape. And the reason why we would use the super old approach is one, we know it works and two, these are typically technologically simple approaches.

So if the goal is to identify restoration approaches that work really well and to get them widely used, then you need to use something that's inexpensive and that's technologically simple. So what I mean by that is, someone might find this sort of silver bullet that works 100 percent of the time to restore arid landscapes, but if it's 5,000 an acre, no one's ever going to use that approach.

If you need to buy a 30,000 machine to use that approach no one, most people aren't going to use it. We look to the past to see what people have used for things like using rocks, using seed balls, which I can get into later, I'm obsessed with seed balls, and these approaches have been used by many people for a very long time, and they work.

The challenge is that often these approaches have not been tested in sort of a formal experimental framework. And the only thing that that means is that it's really hard to make science based recommendations to folks of how to use it. So I can tell people, you know, people have been using rocks for 4,000 years at least to move water.

So if you want to move water on a landscape, you can use rocks. And then folks will say like, great. How many rocks do I use? What size? What shape? Where do I distribute them on a landscape? And just because people have been using rocks to move water for 4,000 years doesn't mean that there's now some kind of recommendation for how you actually do that.

To get to that level of making recommendations to people, you have to kind of test these different designs in a experimental framework. So that's what we do in my lab. We test lunas, which are these half moon shaped rock structures that are really important for capturing organic material and seeds and acting as really important islands of fertility, that is little nurseries for native and desired plants.

We use seed balls, so seed balls are this super ancient technique of mixing seed and some kind of organic material, some kind of tackifier to keep it all together and get desired plants out on a landscape, particularly in dryland habitats. So that's kind of what I mean when I talk about novelty. Again, these are things that people have been using for over a millennia, but in my lab what we're trying to do is leverage this existing knowledge that we know works into a framework where then we can make recommendations to managers who might have really different environmental contexts, right?

How do you use seed balls on a landscape that's grazed or not, that's experienced a fire or hasn't or is, you know, receives 10 inches of rain versus 13 inches of rain a year. 

Sarah LeRoy: Thanks, Elise. So, building on that, I'm curious, how does climate change factor into your restoration work? Do you modify your plans or strategies based upon anticipated future conditions?

Elise Gornish: Yeah, that's an interesting question. So, I work with a lot of native species, particularly in the Sonoran Desert and the arid Southwest, and a lot of people are like, oh, well, these are, you know, super drought tolerant species. Like, you can just seed them out on the landscape and they will grow. And that might have been true like 30 or 40 years ago, but now we're at a time where the climate is different.

It's drier and hotter than most of these species can tolerate or are adapted to. And so what that means is that when you think about doing restoration or you think about doing vegetation management, you can't just throw some native plants down on the ground either by seed and just expect them to do well, right?

You have to consider how exaggerated and chronic drought might play a role. You have to think about what, you know, if you get some plants out on the landscape and it's super dry and there's no other plants living on the landscape, and now you've just put a bunch of green material out on the landscape, the animals are just going to be like, mmm, lunch.

So, I think about climate change both from a perspective of how do we utilize native plant materials and how do we leverage sort of water capture and water filtration, and also to the future of Okay, we have these native species that we might want to get back on the landscape. Are there varieties that might be more tolerant of drying conditions?

Are there varieties that might be more tolerant of these temperature, high temperatures? And so it gets a little troublesome because basically we're starting to move into a sphere of climate change where people need to seriously start considering Varieties, and I'm talking just to plants, I'm a plant person, I don't know really anything about animals, but we're moving into a time where climate change has changed so much already, and we know it will increase in the pace in which it's changing, that we now need to start considering varieties and even maybe species that are not native to a region but are from a more drought stricken or hotter region and so preparing for drought resilience for the future. 

And that's very scary for people because essentially what I'm saying is that there's a potential that people should consider planting species that are not native to a region because you need to start considering planting the species that are adapted to your current climate.

Climate conditions, and right now the current climate conditions of where I'm sitting is not what the plants that are growing around here are adapted to. So do you reinstall, do you reseed out the species you've lost that are actually not adapted to current climate conditions, which is kind of following along lines of traditionally defined ecological restoration, or do you consider using plant materials from more equator ward or lower elevations, so species that are better adapted to the drier and hotter conditions of your location.

And that is not traditional restoration at all. This is more of this, you know, assisted migration thing that people are doing with butterflies and, and whatever, but it, it freaks a lot of people out. You know, we, as researchers don't necessarily have the best history of moving things to, to address a problem, and it doesn't become another problem.

You know, the USDA moved tamarisk, the USDA is the reason we have buffelgrass, and those were, those were efforts that were done with, with good intentions, but, you know. We didn't know enough about what was going to happen and now we have these super problematic species. So people have a lot of the similar concerns about moving native, non aggressive species from one region to another in order to accommodate for sort of the new climate conditions.

It's, it's a really gray sort of topic. It's not black and white. I am of the mind that It's really important to get plants down on the ground after a degrading event, particularly after a fire or something like that, because it's so easy to lose topsoil. It's so easy for erosion to just take off that really, really important organic rich and seed rich topsoil layer.

Once you lose that, you're done. And in the arid Southwest, we have a very, very thin layer. So getting plants on the ground is really important. Now I'm not, I'm not an advocate for just getting anything down there or spreading non native seed all over the place. But we're at a time where we're losing tons of habitat, and the positive feedback of once you lose plant materials on the ground then erosion is more likely to happen.

And then you're less likely to get, you know, regeneration from the seed bank, or you're less likely to have the soil microbial communities that are really important for your native plants. So if you seed out, you're less likely to get germination. So it very, very quickly could get really, really bad if you don't have something out on a landscape.

So a lot of people around here, they're seeding out the same, you know, nine workhorse species that they've been seeding out forever. And those workhorse species did great maybe 30 years ago, but they are no longer adapted to our climate conditions now. So now what do you do? I don't know. It's, it's an interesting question.

Emile Elias: Thanks, Elise. And thank you for moving us into thinking about these challenging questions and also thinking about research. And that moves me to when we were getting ready for this conversation with you today, we took a look at your excellent website and we will drop a link to that in the episode notes.

And we learned a bit about your research projects, or the streams of things you're interested in. And you already mentioned one of those, you mentioned seed balls, and I was hoping you can talk about that a little bit more, talk about some of the research, and really tell us a bit about how they're beneficial.

Elise Gornish: I would love to. I'm obsessed with seedballs. So, basically, I'm going to be a little verbose here, but it's kind of important. So, ecological restoration, to do successful ecological restoration in arid land habitats is hard. It's hard for lots of reasons, but most research has identified that the bottleneck to restoration success, so the thing that restricts restoration success the most in arid land systems, when you're talking about seed based restoration, which is that's what most people do, is the seed germination stage. So you throw out a bunch of seed, you pay tons and tons of money for native seed. You throw it out and it doesn't turn into what you want it to turn into.

Why is that? So there's lots of reasons. One, you can throw seed out on the landscape and it can blow away. It can actually move from where you put it. It can blow away, it can be eaten or moved by seed eating predators such as small mammals or ants. The seed can die due to desiccation stress. So in Tucson and this is not even in Phoenix, but in Tucson, you know, during the monsoons when it's not raining, it can be 120 degrees up here; at the soil surface it can be like 140 degrees. You can get a lot of seed death at the, at the soil surface. And if you do happen to get germination of the seed, if you throw out the seed at the right time and it rains and it germinates, if you don't get rain kind of after that to nourish the seedlings, they, they will also die.

Okay. So what that tells us is that if that's the bottleneck to restoration success, for the most part, then that is the thing you need to work on or mitigate so that you can be successful in restoration. And seed balls are a super ancient technique, so I've read some work from, well, work descriptions from like the fourth century B.C. describing seed balls that in agricultural context, which basically people were taking seed, they were mixing it with some kind of nutrient, usually it's animal dung, And often there was like animal bones or animal blood was mixed in with it. But you make these sort of packets of seeds and you throw it out on the landscape and what happens is that the seeds are protected in these packets from things eating the seeds or from the seeds blowing away because it's weighted down the packets, the seeds are also protected from desiccation stress from the sun, and then when it actually does rain and these little seed balls kind of disintegrate, you get the seeds in this pool of nutrients.

And those nutrients actually hold on to moisture longer than the surrounding soil. So you get these seeds in this little wet, damp pool of nutrients, the seeds germinate, and then they have access to both the moisture and the nutrients. Great. And seed balls are wonderful because they're super easy to make. So I've made them with children. I made them with adults, all kinds of, so they're technologically simple. They're very inexpensive. So the materials you need in addition to the seed are not much more expensive than the seed itself.

You can throw seed balls from your pocket, from a saddle bag. People have drones that deliver them. There's a kid in India who made a backpack that automatically throws seed balls. It's called yeeting. That is the verb of throwing seed balls.

So, and anybody, you know, a backyard gardener can do this for a quarter acre of their backyard. The BLM, the Forest Service, makes seed balls for hundreds of thousands of acres. 

It was actually in the 40s in the U.S. that a dentist I don't know how this happens, but some dentist was like, Hey, we should use seed balls for ecological restoration. The BLM listened to them and they started putting seed balls in airplanes.

It totally failed. But like, if you look at some old reports, it's like all the seed was bad and the seed balls kind of fell apart in the airplanes. So that they became unpopular until the eighties when people started doing guerrilla gardening, which is this idea that you kind of get native plant materials in areas that you don't necessarily own.

So if there's like a vacant lot, you can throw some seeds in there. And seed balls makes it much easier to throw. So in the 80s, seed balls became really popular. And it was only in the last maybe 10 or 15 years that you saw anything about seed balls in sort of formal research. And now there's a whole world, it's called seed enhancement technologies that seed balls are a part of this family. So there's a whole world of it now because people are really starting to understand that it can greatly enhance ecological restoration and people will actually use it. And so a lot of our research kind of looks at seed balls and all kinds of design sort of aspect of seed balls of how big should they be?

What should you put in? Can you put in can you add in inoculants and then actually get more fungal groups out on the landscape. Can you add in all kinds of things that might enhance your ability to achieve your restoration goals? 

Emile Elias: Excellent. And so thank you also for telling us a bit more about, if you want to look into the research, you'd look into the seed enhancement technology if you want to look more into the more modern research about this. So let's shift gears and talk about buffelgrass. So your lab works a lot on buffelgrass with a lot of other people, basically to understand the invasion process and also to develop more effective control measures.

So can you talk a bit about that research? And also share with us what you think at this point might be an effective strategy moving forward. 

Elise Gornish: Yeah. So buffelgrass is really interesting. It has a really interesting history and they're still actually actively selling seed and planting it in Mexico. And buffelgrass is really problematic. It's, it's particularly problematic as sort of invasive species. It's displacing a lot of natives and also it enhances fire frequency and intensity. It's terrible. So I got interested in buffelgrass when I moved to Tucson because it's everywhere. You can just see it everywhere. It likes to grow places it likes to grow everywhere.

So some places it's easy to get to and some places it's on these like rocky slopes that it's impossible for people to control. And so I started working I, I'm sort of a population demographer by trade that's what I did for grad school, so basically that means I look at the life cycle of plants, and one way that people consider invasive plants is that they will try to understand the life cycle and look at areas of the life cycle that are particularly vulnerable to perturbation.

Basically meaning, can I understand what happens between when a buffelgrass seed germinates to when an adult plant makes more seed and understanding where we should hit that plant for control. Because typically when you think of control, you're thinking of, all right, you're spraying a bunch of big plants.

Okay, so that means you're controlling adult plants, but is that where you want to control the population? Does that actually do anything? Because there's actually a lot of work that suggests, you know, you kill a bunch of adult plants and all you're doing is you're opening up space for all the new babies that have, that are under those adult plants that are germinating, and then they get even bigger and more robust and make more seed.

And so you're actually not doing anything. So, my first goal was to kind of, understand the buffelgrass life cycle, which we're doing right now with several long term studies on Tumac Hill and in Saguaro National Park East. It takes several years because you have to follow individuals through time and kind of, you know, it's really tedious work but you get really great information out of it.

So, an old postdoc of mine is actually writing that paper up right now, but what we're also doing in the meantime is we're trying to understand a bunch of different aspects of buffelgrass ecology. So, trying to understand, is buffelgrass, for example, modifying the soil microbiome in a way that enhances its own growth and then keeps out natives?

And this is critical because, you know, every year in Tucson and elsewhere, there are buffelgrass pulls. So there are places where people will actually pull buffelgrass individuals out of the ground. It's great. You take the buffelgrass individual out of the ground. Obviously, it's not going to grow anymore.

But if that buffelgrass individual or that patch of individuals or a population is modifying the soil in a way, they're changing the types of bacteria you'll find, they're changing the biomass of bacteria you'll find, or something like that. If they're changing something in the soil that both enhances their own growth as well as makes it harder for natives to grow, then when you take that buffelgrass out of the ground, it's highly unlikely that that area will then be covered by native plants, which is ultimately the goal, right?

Because native plants are not going to be able to grow with those changed soils, and we don't know, and a lot of invasive plants do this. So that's something that we're really interested in. We're also really interested in just are we doing the right thing for buffelgrass control? 

And sort of Invasion Ecology 101 tells you when you have disturbance, you're going to get more invasion. So, by pulling that buffelgrass out of the ground, particularly in an area where you've probably had buffelgrass for a while, and buffelgrass has like a at least 12 year seed bank, which means it takes about 12 years to get rid of all the seed, because they're, they're, they make these seeds.

Tons and tons of seeds. It hangs out in the seed bank. So if you pull buffelgrass out of the ground, you know, you modify or you disturb the soil and then you walk away, what's the likelihood that a native plant seed finds itself there or is able to germinate and out competes the millions of buffelgrass seed in the soil.

So I had a student that, Hannah Farrell, who's now with the USGS, she's fabulous, she did a review of all the published studies which admittedly are very biased towards ecological research as opposed to just management, but she did a study where she looked at all the studies that looked at buffelgrass control and what we found is actually pulling buffelgrass is not the most effective way. In fact, in many cases, it does enhance buffelgrass cover, which again, is what Invasion Ecology 101 would tell you. What you want to do if you're going to pull buffelgrass is at least seed in. It's highly unlikely that the seed bank, even if you have native seeds in the seed bank, will be able to out compete the buffelgrass.

And there were a lot of people that got really mad at us for publishing that. And again, I'm not, against buffelgrass pulls per se, I think they're really important for galvanizing and educating the community. But they don't necessarily work for controlling buffelgrass, and in some cases they might be encouraging buffelgrass.

So what does that mean? I'm not sure, because as we all know, ecology is very context specific, so there's There might be some places where if you pull the buffelgrass and if it's very early in the invasion process, so they haven't been around that long, there's a very, very small seed bank of buffelgrass seeds.

Those are places that probably you can pull and native plants will recolonize on their own. In cases where that's not, what’s going on? If you're going to pull buffelgrass, you should really reseed. And I'm actually a huge proponent of doing restoration or reseeding of native plant species whenever you do any invasive plant control.

One of my goals for my career, I guess, is that when people think of sort of the typical tool belt or the toolkit of invasive plant management, which is spraying, pulling, fire, livestock. The other thing they're going to think of is like reseeding with natives, because in lots of cases we cannot just wait, especially in the Sonoran Desert, where we have a lot of really slow growing species, or you might have a depopulated seed bank.

You can't always rely on the existing seed bank, and so actively re seeding in desired native plant species is a really good approach for cementing the likelihood that the next sort of generation of plants that grows are the things you want to grow. 

Emile Elias: Excellent, thanks. And you mentioned a few times managers and practitioners out on the landscape, and so I'm wondering if you work with land managers and practitioners in your research?

Elise Gornish: Yeah, so as a Cooperative Extension specialist, sort of a big part of my job, of what I get paid to do, is to interact directly with folks out on the landscape. So that's managers, homeowners, users, renters of land, anyone who derives something from the landscape. So I work with everything from federal partners, state, local, government agencies, community groups, conservation ranching groups.

Backyard gardeners, Master Gardeners, all kinds of people. And I work with them much, much more than I work with academic colleagues, I would say. Because my job is to identify stakeholder need and then deliver the science, those stakeholders need to address their challenges, right? So there's this like Venn diagram of stakeholder need and what I like and what I'm good at, and where those two circles kind of overlap is where I do my research.

So I think that I have a fairly good idea of kind of what stakeholders need and want, because I talk with them constantly. People who derive their livelihoods from a site are going to know more about that site than I ever could, even if I had a long term experiment there.

Why? Because those people that like, you know, money to feed their families comes from knowing what's on the site. Right? And so folks have, folks who live and work and enjoy these locations kind of tell me so much more about what's going on and the history than I could ever learn from like, you know, putting down a meter squared plot and assessing the, the plant cover.

Emile Elias: Excellent. Thank you. And I think we will have a follow up conversation about what you're hearing from people. I am curious about if any of those stakeholders were the people that were upset with you when you basically said, don't remove the buffel grass. Same, same group or different? 

Elise Gornish: Yeah, yeah, I mean because I work across a lot of different groups.

I got a bunch of angry emails from, from folks I had worked with a bunch. I, I got enough angry emails and most of the emails said, You know, how dare you make this statement about what we're doing. You didn't even, you know, take our data into account. And I was like, you're absolutely right. We made that very clear in the paper and the peer review publication that went off into, you know, other scientists read it, but we made very clear that, you know, the data we were using was just from a very biased subset of data.

And, and that's true. But people were still upset because basically. What we were, some people what we were saying is like, this stuff that you have spent years and years and years doing, it might not be working very well. And I can understand why that's upsetting, but I would also think that maybe folks can, I mean, there's nothing wrong with like learning something new or tracking in a different direction because you have received new information and now you can make it better.

So, and again, I still, I'm not against buffelgrass pulls. I think they're really, really important for community engagement and education and galvanizing. And there probably are locations where it's effective. But it's probably not effective everywhere and in some places it's probably making the problem worse.

So instead of getting upset, we should be kind of considering where we're doing buffelgrass pulls and thinking about, okay, is this a place that would benefit from reseeding with native plant species? Is that possible? Do we have the funding or the expertise to do that? Or maybe trying to identify these new sort of satellite populations that don't have these seed banks where don't have these buffelgrass seed banks where you're going to be most likely to be successful.

There's another whole world of sort of invasion in ecology research that says, you know, instead of trying to control sort of core populations where you have like the oldest densest patches of buffelgrass which are ugly and suck and they will catch fire and they're terrible. Those are actually the hardest patches to control and the least likely that you're going to be successful.

What you want to do is go to these satellite, these newer patches where you don't have this probably the, the significant changes in the soil chemistry and, and biodiversity. You don't have the buffelgrass seed bank and you're gonna be much more likely to be successful. So I think that my work just suggests sort of a, an alternate way to consider doing the same thing, but maybe doing it in a more effective way.

But, you know, people are gonna get mad at you and that's okay. I tried to talk with some folks. Some people were understanding and some, are not interested in working with me ever again, and that's, that's okay. You can't, you can't make everyone happy all the time. 

Emile Elias: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So I'm going to ask you about one final strategy in terms of the research projects that you're doing, and that's rangeland reseeding using trait-based approaches.

Can you talk a little bit about that, maybe share a success or two in that area? 

Elise Gornish: Yeah, so That, rangeland reseeding using trait-based approaches is just kind of a fancy way to say reseeding, because this is something stakeholders have been doing forever. It's basically reseeding using a strategy of the plant that will help you achieve your goal.

So what does that mean? It's like, you know, if you're working in an area, that is particularly prone to erosion, for example, maybe you're less like, you're less interested in flower production for pollinators, and you're more interested in identifying species that make fibrous roots very, very quickly, right?

Because they're, those species are going to disproportionately contribute to arresting erosion. And so using trait based approaches just means identifying and clarifying goals, which, sure, most restoration is like, get native plants or get desired plants back in the landscape, but then there's goals beyond that, right?

Pollinator habitat or forage production, arresting erosion, brush management, all kinds of things. Identifying those goals and then saying, okay, what traits of plants will help me get and achieve those goals faster? And so we've done some work, usually we're looking at things related to drought and drought resilience.

So how do you choose species that are more drought tolerant? And, you know, I work mostly in the Sonoran Desert. Everything here is desert plants. Most things are fairly drought tolerant, but most desert plants, particularly here in the Sonoran Desert, are not tolerant or adapted to chronic drought, which is what we're seeing now, I mean, it's not even, drought is now more the rule than the exception, right?

And so how do you deal with that? All plants need water of some kind, and how plants deal with a lack of water, they have lots of different strategies, and those strategies are usually supported by different traits. So, actually I have a, a postdoc that was working with me last year that she was doing a bunch of work looking at different kinds of root traits because usually you would think, like, oh, we'll just get a plant with, like, big roots.

Actually, no, because usually there's a trade off between thicker roots, which usually means that the plant will stick around longer, and thin but fibrous and lots of roots, dense roots. So, like, which one's better? I don't know. And which one's better for medium versus like chronic drought? Things like that.

So we think about that a lot and usually we have to think also about multiple ecosystem services. So as I mentioned, you know, getting plants on the landscape and erosion control is really important, but I work in many working landscapes, which typically means there's going to be livestock, okay? And so if you have livestock, you need plants out on the landscape that have high protein content, that are good for putting fat on cows.

Okay, a lot of people, particularly restoration ecologists, they don't agree with, with grazing, and that's fine if that's how they feel, but I eat meat, so I'm, I'm okay with grazing, and I'm also very okay with working with stakeholders who are out on landscapes, and if you don't agree with grazing, that's, that's how you feel, but grazers are still going to be out there.

So I like working with people who are out on the landscape. And so if you're going to have livestock on the landscape, if you want to get the managers and the ranchers on board with the land management that that you're suggesting, You've got to enable them to ranch, and that means you need forage out there, that there's, that their cows can eat.

So what that means is that you also have to think about, okay, fibrous roots or, or thick roots to hold onto soil to arrest erosion, but also high protein content species or, or perennial species. So you don't have to go back and re-seed every year. So we're still, we're still doing a lot of research on that.

Some of the research, we've done some field work that has been sort of unequivocal, and then we've done a bunch of greenhouse work that suggests some stuff that is, will be submitted very, very soon. Bringing things out from the greenhouses, obviously, very important. And also we see that it's very context specific, right?

You, you, we, we have some greenhouse studies where we found every species responded the same way, and we're like, yes, this is a general concept we found. And then you do something out in the field, and it's like one species does one thing, another species is another thing. It also matters, you know, context also matters.

We've done some work on trait based responses to water manipulation, so essentially how are plants responding to drought, and it differs whether there's invasive next to them or not. So if you're in a fairly intact system, how you might think about traits and choosing species for restoration is going to be different than if you're in a system that is overrun with a particular type of invasive.

So, sadly, it depends. Which is not very satisfying for either the researcher or the manager, but. 

Sarah LeRoy: Okay, thanks, Elise. I wanted to switch gears just a little bit and talk about a Southwest CASC funded project that you have that's working with the Navajo Nation. And so this project is focused on uniting Western science and Indigenous knowledge to build capacity and strengthen climate resilience on the Navajo Nation. So, could you please describe the goals of the project, but also maybe tell us how it developed? 

Elise Gornish: Sure. So, Navajo Nation is experiencing chronic drought like a lot of places in the Southwest. And There are many sort of, Tribal, both Navajo-specific as well as other tribal approaches that groups have been using forever to manage livestock, to manage water, to manage erosion control, and to manage plants.

And as I talked about sort of earlier on, a lot of these approaches are suggested to be very successful, either by word of mouth, or there's some written documentation, but often there has been no tested, they haven't been tested in sort of a formal experimental framework, only meaning that it's hard to sort of make recommendations to people in terms of design of how you can employ some of these strategies. So, my PhD student, Markel Begay, she's Diné and she is living up on the Navajo Nation and she was really interested in trying to unite some of these traditional approaches with more contemporary approaches. So for example, one of the things Markel was really interested in is that traditionally Navajos, Navajo peoples would seed in these spiral formations.

And that is kind of in comparison to sort of random seeding, right, just trying to get a coverage. And so she was just like, You know, there's these spiral formations. We didn't find almost anything written about it, but it's things that she had heard of from folks that she lives and works with, and she's like, I want to test it and see, you know, are there actually differences in the way that plants grow or who grows or when?

And so she's doing sort of some fairly basic, but really necessary fundamental studies looking at the differences in plant cover depending on sort of how you seed out and who you're seeding. And so actually trying to get to understand the mechanisms driving differences in the outcomes of these traditional forms of seeding versus kind of what we're doing today, which is much more just like seeding out randomly on the landscape, for example.

We're also looking at seeding out of Navajo critical native species on Media Lunas. So Media Lunas are these half moon shaped rock structures that you deploy across the landscape. So each individual rock structure is made up of lots of rocks, and it can be about, I don't know, 10 feet across and, and two feet wide, something like that.

And the goal of these structures is that you put them across a flat landscape, kind of where sheet movement, sheet flow of water happens. So when there's a lot of rain from monsoon and the ground is particularly degraded, the ground isn't able to take up all that water. So it sort of floods and slowly flows.

So as it's flowing across the landscape, It's picking up organic material and seed and soil and it's causing more erosion. So, how can we address that? Well, at least 4,000 years ago, people were putting these rock structures, which they would deploy across the landscape and when water hits the rock structure, the rock structure doesn't stop the water.

But when the water hits the rock structure, the force of the water is reduced just a little bit, and the organic material and the seeds that the water is carrying are dropped. They're dropped at the rock structure. Later when the water sort of recedes, you have these rock lunas that are full of organic material and seed and soil, and they become these amazing nurseries of plants.

And so you get these sort of islands of fertility. These, these very localized areas where you get a bunch of plant growth, and the rocks themselves also enhance that because they're shading the soil surface, so they're increasing soil moisture at the soil surface, and they're reducing temperature. When the seeds are in between the rocks and plants are growing, it's actually harder for animals to get their faces in to eat the plants, so they're protected from herbivory.

So, these structures have been used for a very long time, but we don't know sort of how do you scale up from a, you know, 10 foot by two foot structure. To a pasture that's 30 acres or something like that. And so, something else Markel is looking at is she's building on some existing work that we have done in the Altar Valley, and she has deployed an experiment looking at design and outcomes in the Santa Rita Experimental Range, where we have lunas of different shapes and sizes.

They're either seeded or not, so that she can better understand sort of how some of these approaches might operate together to ultimately kind of result in plant growth in a degraded area, and then try to understand the mechanisms of how those things are working together so that we can design approaches for individual contexts.

And these are really important for climate, because as I said in the beginning, drought and the subsequent erosion that happens, wind erosion is a terrible problem across the Navajo Nation, both in Arizona and New Mexico. And so how do you arrest that erosion because again, once you lose that topsoil it doesn't come back.

And so what are strategies that we can both get plants back on the landscape and reduce erosion and a logistically feasible and monetarily feasible approach? 

Emile Elias: Well, thank you so much for talking about all of these different approaches. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox and a lot of things you're looking at, which is really important.

That gives me hope. And we always ask the experts that we get to talk to in these conversations, what gives them hope? So I'm going to ask you that question. What gives you hope? 

Elise Gornish: That's a great question. I love having a, it's not all doom and gloom. So I'll say two things, lots of things give me hope. But the two things I usually bring up is one, you know, it's really easy.

There's actually been studies done on environmental problems that happen and there's usually huge media surrounding it. And then if we ever solve that problem, the media surrounding the solving, which doesn't happen often but it happens, is so minimal. So we actually don't know that there's, there's good things happening all the time.

So knowing that really gives me hope. And additionally, I meet a lot of young people certainly younger than I, both in college as well as in high school. Even my, my daughter's in Girl Scouts, even girls that are seven and, and youth. I have a lot of faith in youth.

Unfortunately, we are leaving our youth, a lot of things they have to clean up but young people are so motivated and smart and interested and caring and, and about the environment and their going to help us solve our problems. They are already you know, leading the way with a lot of initiatives.

They know that certain things work, certain things don't, and there's a lot of things we don't know and we need to explore, and I think that they're a lot more open minded than maybe a lot of my colleagues and myself, and, and we need that because, you know, novel and, and novel problems need novel strategies, yeah, so climate change is, is fairly novel in like the history of the, the world, but I don't know, young people, they're, they're gonna save us, and it's unfortunate that they have to do that, that we can't do it ourselves.

I mean, there's definitely a lot of things changing now, but I don't know, I, I just see how motivated and how smart and amazing like even our students on campus are in, in my department and, and in restoration clubs, and I work with high schoolers, and they're just, they're so into sort of, valuing the planet and really realizing that there's just one. So if we mess it up, that's, that's it. There's no do overs. So that gives me a lot of hope. 

Emile Elias: Dr. Elise Gornish, thank you so much for talking with us today. 

Elise Gornish: Thanks for having me. This was great.

Emile Elias: Thanks for listening to Come Rain or Shine, podcast of the USDA Southwest Climate Hub

Sarah LeRoy: and the USGS Southwest CASC. If you liked this podcast, don't forget to rate or review it and subscribe for more great episodes. A special thanks to our production crew, Skye Aney, and Reanna Burnett. If you want more information, have any questions for the speakers, or would like to offer feedback, please reach out to us via our website.