Visit to NatureBridge School in Olympic National Park

With an invitation from education manager Chris Morgan, I paid a visit and gave a talk to the educational staff at NatureBridge, on the shore of Lake Crescent.   I had an engaging exchange with about twenty staff members, all of them environmental educators whose mission

"is to connect young people to the wonder and science of the natural world, igniting self-discovery and inspiring stewardship of our planet. Through our overnight, hands-on environmental science programs, we take more than 35,000 children and teens each year into our national parks to explore the outdoors, connect with their peers, discover themselves and develop a lasting relationship with the environment." 

The low elevation mature and old-growth forests surrounding Lake Crescent are healthy.  Sword ferns dominate large areas of undergrowth - with no sign of any die-off.

We emerged from this meeting, which concluded with a walk in the woods, with a tentative plan: that NatureBridge staff and their students may contribute to understanding the die-off, and more fundamentally to the understanding the ecology and biology of sword ferns, through careful  observations over the coming years. 

Some of the topics we discussed:

1.  Sword ferns rarely reproduce under a closed forest canopy.  See Robbin Moran's  Natural History of Ferns report that the prothallus (the gametophyte) needs recently exposed bare soil (and presumably ample sunlight) for propagation.  
2. Individual plants (the familiar sporophyte generation) are very long-lived ("a thousand years is not out of the question" - David Barrington, University of Vermont polystichum expert)
3.  Are there any signs of fern mortality, or propagation, in the healthy fern communities in Olympic National Park?  To suppport or contradict topics 1 and 2?

 We know little about the variability of the annual life cycle of healthy ferns and their fronds.   Perhaps a multi-year phenology project would be a good match for NatureBridge students?   A combination of careful observation in the forest, data collection, hypothesis generation and testing?

In this scenario, student scientists, backed up by trained academics (we have contacts with some helpful ones) could contribute new understanding of this signature PNW species, and provide baseline and background information we need to explore the die-off