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| Photo: Alan Templeton |
by Diana Lutz
Washington University in St. Louis
Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, burned down a mountain to save a lizard.
In a thirty-year study of the Eastern collared lizard, Templeton found that small prescribed burns did little to restore the lizard’s unusual habitat, but that burning entire mountains and valleys, called landscape-level burning, undid ecological damage that was slowed but not stopped by the smaller burns.
Templeton reports his findings in the cover story of the September 2011 issue of Ecology. He says the landscape-level burns allowed the lizards to undertake their own expanded restoration effort without the assistance of biologists.
Moreover, burning benefited many species besides the lizards, including a rare fen orchid and fen dragonfly, that were flying under the radar and would probably never have commanded labor intensive restoration efforts on their own.
Fire turned restoration from a time-consuming labor-intensive process to one that ran pretty much on its own.
Witness to extinction
Templeton’s acquaintance with the Eastern collared lizard began when he was 13. He was hiking with his Boy Scout troop near Mina Sauk Falls in the Ozarks when they happened upon a glade, and he saw his first collared lizard.
To many people, the word glade suggests a grassy sun-dappled forest clearing like those in Longfellow’s poetry. The Ozark glades, however, are nothing like these literary glades.
Instead, they are areas of exposed bedrock in the Ozark woodlands that create their own hot, dry, desert-like microclimates. Among the species that live in the Ozark glades are tarantulas, scorpions, prickly pear cactus — and lizards.
The Eastern collared lizard (Crotaphytus collaris collaris) is so called for the darkly pigmented bands around its neck. Missouri is at the eastern end of the collared lizards range, which includes much of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
“I’d never seen anything like it in Missouri. It was big, it was colorful and it got up on its hind legs and took off running. I just fell in love with them,” Templeton says. Later, as a nature counselor at Camp Taum Sauk, he led kids on popular collared lizard hikes.
Templeton went off to get his Ph.D. in Michigan and to do research in Hawaii and at the University of Texas. When he returned to Missouri, he got a job at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is currently the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences.
Templeton’s research focus is fruit flies, but when his colleauge Owen Sexton, PhD, a WUSTL ecologist who was studying the life history of collared lizards, told him he was having trouble finding his study subjects, Templeton offered to share the knowledge honed as a Boy Scout and camp counselor.
“I said I’d take him down to this area and show him all these collared lizard populations,” Templeton says. “So I went down there and in glade after glade that had collared lizards when I was a teenager, now they’re not there. I was shocked. So I started looking into it.”
In 1982, after a rigorous survey of the Missouri glades, Templeton and his colleagues estimated that at least 75 percent of the lizard populations had gone extinct. In some areas of the Ozarks, the lizards had vanished entirely.
The red cedar lag
What had happened? The answer turned out to be firefighting.
What had happened? The answer turned out to be firefighting.
“In the Ozarks, you really didn’t have effective fire suppression until after World War II,” Templeton says. “That’s when all the fire towers and lookout towers went in, and the forest service began to fight wildfires.” (Smokey the Bear, the forest service’s mascot, dates from 1944.)
Glades no longer swept by fire were invaded by Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). “Before fire suppression, the red cedar was actually a very rare tree,” Templeton says. “When they’re young, they’re full of resin, so they’re not fire resistant. In fact, they candle, they almost literally explode in a fire.”
“Before fire suppression, the red cedars were basically confined to cliff and bluff faces where the fire couldn’t reach. Now they’re just all over the place.”
But why were the glades still healthy when Templeton was young? “Typically in the harsh glade environment, the red cedars are slow growing,” Templeton says. “So there is a 30- or 40-year lag before the consequences of fire suppression catch up to you.
“Then, suddenly, the red cedars are big enough to start shading out the glade and the whole glade community collapses.
“When I was a teenager, I was on the good side of that curve,” he says. “The red cedars were coming in but the glades were basically in very good shape. But when I returned to Washington University as an associate professor, I was on the wrong side of the curve and the glades were in terrible shape.“
A fire fight
The problem, Templeton suspected, was that the lizards were trapped on the glades by the dense understory of the woodlands surrounding them, which had not been touched by fire for a long time.
The problem, Templeton suspected, was that the lizards were trapped on the glades by the dense understory of the woodlands surrounding them, which had not been touched by fire for a long time.
In 1992, a Biodiversity Task Force, of which Templeton was a member, recommended landscape-level burning.
“We’d been burning prairies and glades for a long time, and everybody liked that,” Templeton says, “but what we were saying was we’re going to burn an entire landscape, including glades and prairies but also woodland and fens. Everything. Because that’s the way fires used to be.”
The proposal raised a firestorm of protest. Foresters didn’t like it because it flouted the Smokey the Bear tradition and environmentalists didn’t like it because they regarded it as yet another attempt by people to manipulate nature.
“Believe you me,” Templeton says, “both groups were adamantly opposed. The only thing they could agree on was that what we were trying to do was bad.”
After two years of infighting, the first burn was held in spring 1994. That burn encompassed two of the three glades with reintroduced lizards. In 1999, the burn management area was expanded to include all of Stegall Mountain and the third lizard population, as well as several adjacent mountains and the interlaying valleys.
The transformative power of fire
“We did the burn and to tell the truth, I wasn’t really very optimistic about it,” Templeton says. “I thought it was more really to reduce the fuel load, but I was stunned by what it did. Just one burn totally changed the environment. All of us were just shocked at how beneficial it was.
“We did the burn and to tell the truth, I wasn’t really very optimistic about it,” Templeton says. “I thought it was more really to reduce the fuel load, but I was stunned by what it did. Just one burn totally changed the environment. All of us were just shocked at how beneficial it was.
“The fire mainly got rid of the woody understory and thick mats of leaf litter, but it didn’t destroy the canopy trees. In fact, with the woody understory gone, the canopy trees grew better, so the forestry people were happy.
“The woody understory was mostly exotics, little shrubby trees that came from elsewhere. Once they were gone, the nutrients were released into the soil, and the soil was exposed to more sunlight, the endemics came back. All these endemic herbaceous plants came out of the forest floor and with them came a very abundant insect community. So the environmentalists were happy, too."
Even the hunters were happy, he says, because the grasshopper populations exploded — as Templeton proved by counting grasshoppers — and wild turkeys populations boomed, fattened on grasshoppers.
“And we were happy,” Templeton says, “because the lizards started to move about. The burn was in early April and by May and June of that year, the lizards were already beginning to disperse and colonize new glades.”
The Ecology paper celebrates the fact that on the first mountain to be recolonized, the metapopulation of lizards living on interconnected glades had been stable since 2000.
“The glades only support a dozen lizards or so,” Templeton says, “so you always have this problem that just by chance one population might go extinct. And if you’re in a situation where the glade can’t be recolonized, that’s it, you’re done.
“After 1994, we still had Stegall glades going extinct, but now they’d be extinct for one or two years and then they’d be recolonized because the woodland has this more open habitat form and the lizards can move through it.
“The Stegall metapopulation is very dynamic,” he says. “Local components of it blink on and off, but at the global level it is very stable.
“But the important point is we no longer have to transport lizards. Instead, we’ve created the ecological conditions that let them get there on their own four legs. I put them on three glades on those mountains, and on their own they’ve colonized another 140.
“So our work shows that if you manage at the landscape level and restore fundamental ecological processes, that’s the best way of doing species conservation, because we just don’t have the time and resources to save a species one by one.
On the lizard’s coattails
Moreover, Templeton says, if you manage at the landscape level you support not only charismatic species like the collared lizards but also many equally endangered but less glamorous species that otherwise might perish unnoticed
Moreover, Templeton says, if you manage at the landscape level you support not only charismatic species like the collared lizards but also many equally endangered but less glamorous species that otherwise might perish unnoticed
In the case of the collared lizards, the coattail riders included two endemic fen species: the snakemouth orchid and Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
“Because the fens are wet, you wouldn’t expect them to burn,” Templeton says. “But I went to one of the fens during a burn and there was a wall of fire 20 feet high traveling across the fen.
“As soon as the top layer of the fen burned, all these old species popped up, including the snakemouth orchid, an orchid that grows only in fens in the Ozarks and that was known from only a handful of locations.
The Ozarks are also home to an endangered dragonfly called the Hine’s emerald dragonfly for its bulbous emerald-green eyes. The Hine’s dragonfly can hybridize with a sister species that’s adapted to the forest. Because the forest species is very abundant and the forests were encroaching on the fens, hybridization was wiping out the fen dragonfly genetically.
“When we burned, we separated the species a bit — it didn’t take much — and that helped the dragonfly,” Templeton says.
“When I first started doing this,” Templeton says, “I didn’t think about the fens, to tell the truth, and we burned the fens because they were part of the landscape and suddenly all this stuff started appearing.
“In conservation biology," Templeton says, “you’re always forced into a position where you have to act on incomplete knowledge because if you wait, the species you are trying to conserve may become extinct.
“You never know what you are going to find, so the constant theme of all this work is the need to regard every conservation program as an experiment. The real work starts after you’ve done the restoration."
