Transcript
Larry Stevens (0:07)
Every one of those springs is visited every day by deer, elk, black bear, mountain lions, you name it. Migrating birds, for example, can detect springs as they as they pass across landscapes and come in to get a drink of water. How they do that, I don't have a clue. These little patches in the landscape end up being keystone ecosystems, small, highly ecologically interactive points in the landscape. They are point sources of biodiversity, but they're also playing a much larger role in the landscape. And this is a different kind of conservation story.
Narrator (1:11)
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
Jack Humphrey (1:14)
I'm your host, Jack Humphrey.
Narrator (1:19)
I first met today's guest, Larry Stevens, around a campfire on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona.
Jack Humphrey (1:25)
He took us out to see these
Narrator (1:27)
tiny shaded springs tucked away in the world's largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest. And I realized right then just how much of a blank spot springs were on my own map. Larry is the director of the Spring Stewardship Institute, and he spent his career proving that these are not just leaks in the ground, they are keystone ecosystems. In this episode, we're diving into the hidden universe of springs. We talk about how they provide half the flow for rivers like The Colorado, the 12 million year old species living inside them and and the massive data gap that's leaving them unprotected from the deep sea floor to the high desert. Larry explains why springs need a global PR campaign and how you can help map them. It's a fascinating look at the archipelago of life that supports everything from migrating birds to the last of our freshwater reserves.
Jack Humphrey (2:17)
Larry, thanks for coming on the Rewilding Earth podcast.
Larry Stevens (2:20)
Thanks so much, Jack, for having me.
Jack Humphrey (2:23)
So let's catch up with your work and what you've been up to.
Larry Stevens (2:26)
Okay. I'm the director of the Spring Stewardship Institute and we are a small organization based in Flagstaff, Arizona, with a mission to improve scientific understanding and management of spring ecosystems around the world. And it's a pretty big hat, but that puts us in a position of being able to interact with all kinds of people and groups that are trying to do the right thing. We manage all the Forest Service springs data for the country and are working with multiple agencies and different projects. The rendezvous there at the Muggy and Rim that you talked about, we went out to a couple of small springs that come out of the highlands along in central Arizona there. And those are remarkable little patches of habitat. They're forested springs, so they're shaded. There's not a whole lot of wetland vegetation, in part because forest management has allowed trees, conifers, and whatnot to start crowding the landscape there. And that shade knocks out the wetland vegetation. If you allow fires to go through those sites and open up the habitat, then the wetland vegetation responds really very positively. We're working with the Forest Service to try to talk with them about adjusting their buffer strategy in fires and protecting springs. But that springs we got through there, little features coming out, very anomalously tiny catchment areas that remain perennial even during severe drought. We've had, well, in the last 25 years, we've had the most severe droughts that this region has ever seen. And the world is certainly understanding that climate change, a phrase we can't use anymore. So I substitute the phrase integrated weather pattern alteration. IPWHA is IPWA is just taking its toll on groundwater infiltration, especially in these areas where snowpack is the big deal. Snow melts slowly and that allows groundwater to sink into the earth. And springs are 99.999% surface water, meteoric water. The water comes out in these little places that play. They have their own internal biology, many species unique to those. We saw stone flies at that site, some mollusks, mayflies, things that don't occur anywhere else in the landscape except at those tiny patches. And so there's a lot of intrinsic biology going on in those sites. And then every one of those springs is visited every day by deer, elk, black bear, mountain lions, you name it, the whole array of small and large animals. Bird life is just off the charts at those sites. Somehow migrating birds, for example, can detect springs as they pass across landscapes and come in to get a drink of water. How they do that, I don't have a clue. But not at all unusual to see bear sign and in some cases mountain lion sign, bobcat, coyote, all the predators come into those sites. So these are these little patches in the landscape end up being keystone ecosystems, in our terminology. Small, highly ecologically interactive points in the landscape. They are point sources of biodiversity, but they're also playing a much larger role in the landscape. And this is a different kind of conservation story, I think, than than most people have in mind. You know, saving the Grand Canyon, saving the Pacific Ocean, saving the great whales. Those are conservation topics, broad ranging, hundreds if not thousands of stakeholders, all with their own opinion about what's the right thing to do. And because I sit in some of those meetings, it takes a long, long time to make even the slightest headway in conservation. In contrast, springs are these kind of archipelago of points in the landscape that play such an important role intrinsically and extrinsically within those landscapes that the conservation model is quite different. We don't really have a conservation model like that where you're looking at, you know, a broad array of island like patches of habitat that can be with where a little bit of attention can go a long way. Part of what we do in this Spring Stewardship Institute work is when we're working with agencies or private individuals trying to figure out what to do with their springs, be able to point out to them where the kind of shortfalls are in management. Oftentimes it's geomorphology, the site's been manipulated or it's been fenced in a way that forces livestock or cattle into the spring area to the detriment of the spring. So we use a, all kinds of metrics to describe this to the, to the spring manager, but can make recommendations about how that spring could be better manipulated and better managed. We also then using that same kind of quantitative tool, are able to say, okay, in a whole landscape. For the thousand springs on Apache Sitgraves National Forest, here are the 20 springs that we visited that where you get the most bang for your buck with management, where a little bit of money can reduce the risk to the integrity of the spring and improve its ecological functionality. And so being able to provide those kind of tools to the managers, I think is a real important step forward. So that's what we do at Spring Stewardship Institute, get information about springs to the managers who can best use them. And in addition, we're learning so much about the biota and the biology of the springs in forested settings like the one you visited, Jack, there, you know, there tend to be maybe just a couple of unique species, but we get into some of these desert springs, for example, arid lands where the springs are really isolated patches of very productive habitat. Montezuma, well, for example down in central Arizona, many sites in Nevada, these are dryland sites where the high productivity of the spring both is an incredible magnet for wildlife. But the springs have been there long enough that they host enormous numbers of unique species. Montezuma, well, with six or eight unique species in it, has the highest concentration of endemic species of any point that we know of in North America. For example, Quatro Cienegas down in Mexico, went down there for a conference this last year. 60 species that are endemic to the springs in that landscape. These are places that really, you know, where the conservation values are so high and the level of knowledge is actually so low that that bringing attention to them is part of why we're our raison D', etre, you know, why we're doing what we're doing at Spring Stewardship.