Lisa Handforth serves as the Fire Ecologist at Grand Canyon National Park. In this episode, we explore her role in the park’s fire program and discuss topics like climate, mycorrhizal fungi, and the interconnectedness of ecosystems. Tune in to discover the vital role of fire in Grand Canyon’s forests and the fascinating world of symbiosis!

---

TRANSCRIPT:

---

Kamryn: Hi! My name is Kamryn and today we're super excited and lucky to be able to speak with Lisa Handforth.

Kamryn: Yeah, thanks so much for being here and kind of taking this time to chat and give a talk tomorrow night. Everyone's super excited to be able to hear that. Lisa: Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Kamryn: If you wouldn't mind just letting us know who you are, and we'll get started.

Lisa: Yeah, I'm Lisa Markovchick, married named Handforth, Fire Ecologist at Grand Canyon National Park.

Kamryn: Awesome. Yeah, can you tell us what that means to be the park’s ecologist? What that looks like here at the Grand Canyon?

Lisa: Yeah so I oversee a fire--we call them the Fire Effects crew. We've got 2 permanent staff and three seasonals who are on the ground collecting both short-term project data and long-term ecological monitoring data, particularly as it pertains to our Fire Program. And then they also collaborate with the inventory and monitoring program. That's the long-term ecological monitoring program for our region, for the National Park Service. And then I spend a lot of time also looking at the interaction between fire and all the different parts of the ecosystem. So, working with our Wildlife and Veg program, for example, thinking about invasives, thinking about our endangered species like Mexican spotted owls, sentry milk vetch that we have, and sort of navigating the intricacies of how fire is interacting with all of the different parts of the ecosystem.

Kamryn: Cool, super cool. And from what I understand, this is a newer role for you, newer in the Park Service, so can you talk about your journey here and why you decided to get into the Park Service?

Lisa: Yeah, I started out in ecology actually up in Seattle, working with volunteers on former Superfund sites to monitor vegetation recovery after restoration projects. And then did a masters in fire ecology in San Diego, looking at some of the endemic plant species and how their life histories interact with fire and are actually dependent on fire. And then worked for the Navy for about a decade, really looking at sort of how the military mission interacts with a lot of our ecology and how to navigate that and make the most of that synergy. And so, we would also look at things like very specific data on microclimate, for example, and how we could leverage that to really help our endangered species and our species at risk. And just, you know, strange things like you think where moving an invasive is a good idea, but there was actually an interaction going on where removing it without providing some of the things that that invasive was now providing to the ecosystem had negative effects on some of our endangered plants and sensitive plants. And so, we're really kind of leveraging that data on the ground to make better decisions and then working with people to help them understand why it was important to protect this plant or this animal, when we also had another mission. And then I really wanted to learn more about our microbiome and how that was playing into things like our wildfire risk and recovery, drought resilience, managing invasives, because we had a lot of wildfire risk reduction activity that we also did on the military lands and a lot of the different pieces of the ecosystem we are trying to address really seemed to interact with the microbiome and we weren't really doing a lot on the ground in response to that new science. And so, I came to Flagstaff to do my PhD in the Gehring Lab at Northern Arizona University and looked at how we can kind of leverage that microbiome along with things like assisted migration in response to climate change and really get a lot more for our efforts out of the management by thinking more about the whole ecosystem. Of things like how it affects plant physiology and their ability to cope with drought or recover after a fire and how that interacts with things like mycorrhizal fungi. And I don't know if I answered all of your questions or not. That was my journey here. But yeah. And then coming to the Park Service honestly has been and is one of the, you know, biggest pleasures and privileges of my life to be called upon to help protect and sort of safeguard and steward these, you know, beautiful places, particularly the, you know, some of the last remaining wild places on the planet. And how amazing they are and to be entrusted to help care for them and work with, you know, other people who are really trying their best to care for them, particularly in, you know, the age that we're in with climate change starting to affect a lot of things.

Kamryn: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Thanks. What have you enjoyed most about your work so far and where do you hope to see the park’s Fire Program going in the next years or phases?

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, so far, I, you know, I just started with the Park Service in February, so I've just been enjoying getting to know this amazing place, in addition to learning more from our fire managers and seeing things, being able to see things more through their eyes. That's been just a great privilege and will help us down the line as we start to look at our data, as well as just getting to know the rest of the team. And so both the folks that I am privileged to mentor and oversee, as well as the larger Grand Canyon team and National Park Service team and all the different things that people are doing. Working hard, you know, with, sort of without, largely without recognition or, you know, agenda, just trying to make sure that we're doing the right things for our park. Yeah. And just seeing everyone's enthusiasm for, for really doing the right thing with regard to managing our lands. As well as getting to know the amazing long term ecological like data set that we have so learning more about what are all the different projects we've done in the past and the innovations that the Fire Program has done in the past and then starting to get into being able to extract like the 30 years of data that we have from the database and get it into some software where we can have a little more flexibility with analyzing it. So that's sort of been an adventure so far, yeah.

Kamryn: Yeah. And you started mentioning this with Grand Canyon, these places that are seeing very real threats these days. So what do you think are the biggest challenges facing Grand Canyon's forests, the ecosystems that you're working with?

Lisa: Yeah, I mean, really the biggest challenge of our time, right, is probably climate change and how do we come together and help all of our species adapt in the time frame that they will need to. So, you know, if you look at the climate future summary for our park for example, it's very clear that our climate is already warming and that the pace of warming is increasing, that we've already had a 17% increase in the precipitation that's falling during the 1% heaviest events. So more, already being very heavily skewed towards more extreme events and that's you know, we often think of warming and fire and drought, but it's also heavy precipitation or precipitation that's not necessarily falling when the species of plants, animals need it. So that snowpack and the window for how long it lasts is changing. Water is running off faster. So, we're seeing, you know, for example, less moisture sinking into the ground and being there for a longer time and these more extreme events and so that's probably our biggest challenge because and it's all intertwined, right like that is also shifting and diminishing our windows where we can do controlled burns for example. And so biggest challenge for us is thinking about how all those things are connected and how can we really leverage everything we've got in defense of protecting our ecosystems, particularly, you know, these very high elevation, mixed conifer, large snowpack areas in a very arid, you know, within the matrix of a very arid region. Right? And all that that brings to us, including our drinking water.

Kamryn: Yeah, yeah. How is the team here working in the face of climate change? How is the team working to kind of maintain these robust ecosystems?

Lisa: Yeah. So, we're actually working, the Fire Program and our Science and Resources folks--so that's our Veg and Wildlife Programs for example--we have a joint effort currently to really start digging into our climate change planning. So, we're spearheading, sort of taking those climate future summaries, that sort of layout--what the meteorological expectations are, right, and climate expectations are and then sort of moving forward from there of how do we maybe need to refine our goals and our strategies? What does the best available science say about the different strategies and their relative risks and advantages? And then also we're taking another look at how--what can our data that we already have tell us about how we've already been affected. You know, are we seeing places that used to be dominated by ponderosa pine now having maybe more pinyon juniper, for example? So that's something I'll be looking at, for example, over the winter as we start to delve into really analyzing that data that we have to try and figure out if what changes we're already seeing from a species perspective and if that, you know, what are the implications for our management. For example, if we’re looking at prescribed fire and how to manage, what is that optimal interval? Maybe if it used to be ponderosa pine and it's moving more towards pinyon juniper, that interval may b...