WWU researcher studies how plants live through climate change

BELLINGHAM — Eric DeChaine sees in the lovely purple bloom of Siberian aster, the fluffy white head of cottongrass and the red bristling flower of king's crown questions locked in time.

How did they survive the last ice age, which ended about 18,000 years ago? How did similar species end up spread over pockets of Arctic and alpine tundra, including the area around Mount Baker? And what could their ability to survive climate changes of the past say about their chances of making it through today's global warming?

DeChaine, a 38-year-old biology assistant professor at Western Washington University, has been delving into parts of the mystery for nearly a decade.

A $419,000 National Science Foundation grant means he'll be able to continue his research, this time with the help of two Western Washington University students who will travel with him this summer to the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve in Alaska and the islands of the Bering Sea — to pick flowers.

Jenna McAleer, 27, is one of two students going this year.

"It's a once in a lifetime opportunity," says McAleer, who's interested in tropical botany and who will be studying a family of insect-eating plants, found on the tundra of Alaska and in this region, that likely originated in South America.

"I'm excited to go up there. It will be hard waiting that long," says the other student, 20-year-old William Crowley.

After collecting the plants, DeChaine will sequence their DNA and then add them to the WWU herbarium catalog. The project also will give DeChaine's students a chance to work in the Harvard University Herbarium, which has the largest collection of Alaska plants in the world.

If their field work is anything like DeChaine's forays into the Arctic during the past three years, the students can expect long hours of canoeing and hiking, hordes of hungry mosquitoes, and grizzlies and caribou roaming wild. And lots of time on their hands and knees peering at flowers.

"They're really beautiful, but they're minute," DeChaine says.

Tundra life

DeChaine became deeply interested in his field of study while living in Colorado, where he earned his doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology in 2003. It was also at this time that he did a lot of mountaineering, seeing on the peaks he was climbing "really small flowers that are isolated on top of these mountains."

That had him thinking about biogeography, a field that focuses on the geographic distribution of organisms.

Add the context of time and you get "historical biogeography," he explains.

When DeChaine refers to time, he means the last 2 million years and, within that, the Pleistocene when glaciers covered much of northwestern Europe and North America; where Bellingham is today was basically covered in a sheet of ice a mile thick.

With so much water locked up in glaciers, the sea level dropped.

"What that did is it opened up a land bridge between Russia and Alaska, the Bering land bridge. It was never glaciated, so even in an ice age there was a place where these plants could have persisted," DeChaine says. There also were places where plants survived in the Pacific Northwest.

Hence, DeChaine's focus on what is today the tundra ecosystem of the Arctic and the mountains where lichen, moss, woody plants and grass dominate but trees are rare.

DeChaine is examining 12 species of flowering plants that are found in the Pacific Northwest (down to the Oregon-California border) and parts of the Arctic in Alaska and Siberia, including butterwort, alp lily and saxifrage.

By examining the genetic diversity of the same, or very similar plants, he's hoping to determine how long they've existed on Earth — as long as 18,000 years, 2 million, perhaps even longer? and when the populations split off from one another.

"This helps us understand the process of speciation. What leads to all this diversity that we see out here? What's causing these populations to split apart and go down their own evolutionary trajectory? I'm expecting to find that some are very old and some are very new," he says of the plants.

Answering those questions may, in turn, help with conservation efforts.

This is where the grant comes in.

DeChaine says it will help cover the costs of getting to the Arctic reaches but it also will pay for regional collecting efforts.

"The hope is that while I'm in the Arctic with some students, other students will be running around in the mountains here picking flowers," DeChaine says.

But the allure, of course, is the adventure far from Whatcom County.

Alaska travels

This past summer, DeChaine spent about three weeks of research in the National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska's North Slope. A bush pilot dropped him and fellow traveler, Thomas "Hawkeye" Ruszkowski, a Fairbanks, Alaska, resident and GIS specialist, off in the mountains at the start of July.

They had with them their fold-up canoe, maps and gear, all weighing a total of 600 pounds.

In summer, the sun never sets and the land is bathed in golden light during what would normally be night. "It's absolutely an amazing place. It's an immense area."

The men put their canoe into the Ikpikpuk River. Only it was a dry year.

The river was a big sinuous S, sandy and so shallow in places they had to get out and pull their canoe. "So you're dragging it and you're sinking through the sand in your boots," DeChaine recalls.

There was no current, so they paddled for 17 hours straight that first day.

Some days were hot. Unless there was a breeze, the men could expect to battle mosquitoes. Other days they'd paddle for six hours, hike for eight, make dinner and then have to move the camp to make sure they didn't attract wildlife.

DeChaine says it was like a wildlife expedition at times. They saw grizzly bears, caribou and wolves many of them once the men made their way from the mountains north to the coast, where the animals and birds had migrated for the season.

"You could imagine you're like a deer, because you're going down to pick all these flowers. And you're focusing, you're trying to find the right flower and you've got to pick so many of them. You're hoping that your buddy is looking around," he says.

It was all worth it to get closer to answering age-old questions.

"It's pretty exhausting but the rewards are great."