NARRATOR (DAVID HOWELL, Senior Communications Specialist):
The whitebark pine, listed as a threatened conifer species in 2022, grows primarily in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and as far west as western Canada. The southern part of its habitat is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, an area surrounding Yellowstone National Park that includes many federal and state agencies, tribal governments, and nongovernmental partners.

I’m David Howell and you’re listening to On The Ground, a Bureau of Land Management podcast. When the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021, the BLM invested in ecosystem restoration projects across the country, including projects in whitebark pine forests in these three states. Emily Guiberson started her career in Dillon, Montana, and is now the lead forester for the BLM’s Montana/Dakota State Office. And the first question I asked her was, “Why is the whitebark pine a tree we need to care about?”

EMILY GUIBERSON (BLM Senior Forester, Montana/Dakota): The whitebark pine is a high-elevation five-needle pine species that is very important to ecosystem functioning. It grows at the highest elevations, and the shade protects the watershed. It slows the snow down so it trickles down rather than falling all at once.

It’s also a very, very important food source for various wildlife. The pine jay is one of the main seed dispersers. Grizzly bears – bears in general – have a high-calorie diet because they hibernate. Wildlife species are very keen to forage for this food.

NARRATOR: It’s also a species that’s affected by a number of pests and diseases. One pest is the mountain pine beetle, an insect the size of a grain of rice that, in large numbers, can destroy large stands of trees and leave the trees vulnerable to large, stand-destroying wildfires. Another pest is an invasive fungus called white pine blister rust, which can kill branches and inhibit a tree’s ability to produce cones and seeds. And Emily says there are other problems besides those two, including rising temperatures linked to climate change and the fact that periodic small fires have been eliminated from the landscape.

GUIBERSON: We also noticed that several beetles emerged in one year, which we had never seen before. We also noticed that they are living at higher altitudes than before, because at the altitudes where you find the whitebark, it is usually cold enough for beetles to be there in small populations. They were not able to spread as much as they did at the end of the big droughts of 2008 and 2009.

HOWELL: Yes.

GUIBERSON: So it’s all kind of like that – they’re separate, but they’re all connected.

HOWELL: And these are pretty slow-growing trees, if I remember correctly.

GUIBERSON: Growing very, very slowly. Growing very slowly. The oldest one I ever cored in southwest Montana was probably… We couldn’t get all the way in; we were still a ways from the center, but it was over 350.

HOWELL: Oh, several hundred years old.

GUIBERSON: Mmm-hmm.

HOWELL: Yeah, OK.

NARRATOR: This means that if a wildfire rages through an area already weakened by disease or beetle infestation, it may take a century or more for new whitebark pines to grow large enough to protect an area from rapid snowmelt or provide an adequate food source for animals.

Foresters are working on ways to repel the mountain pine beetle by attaching packets containing a natural chemical pheromone called verbenone, which gives off a smell that makes the beetle think the tree is already infested.

GUIBERSON: For beetles, we can try applying verbenone to deter them. Fire prevention is difficult because it’s really hard to get fire in these ecosystems. We did that in one of the stands here in Dillon, and I think that was probably one of the only… It was the only one in Montana (for BLM) that I know of that we could go through and do some kind of treatment there.

We’ve done a lot of planting. That’s how we deal with rust: we identify trees that we think have signs of rust resistance, collect cones from them and let them grow and test to see if they’re resistant. That’s probably been our biggest impact, I would say, is trying to plant in areas that have recently been burned by fire or where there’s a high mortality rate. We’re just trying to put something back in the soil that we know has the resistance level for the site.

NARRATOR: Foresters and researchers have been working on active treatments to save whitebark pine in the United States and Canada for many years. For the BLM, a recent addition to the funding mix through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides for investments in ecosystem restoration, has allowed foresters like Emily Guiberson to add long-term monitoring to the checklist to see if treatments are working.

GUIBERSON: It definitely expanded our ability to do more, for sure. One of the agreements we’ve had for several years was with the National Park Service. They have a monitoring team based in Bozeman that’s been doing this data collection for – I think it’s almost… it’s definitely over 20 years. I don’t know the exact numbers on how long they’ve been doing it. But it was something we kind of wanted to get involved in. And a couple of years ago, we started looking into what that would mean, because they go out – they look at all the areas within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, whether it’s the Park Service, the Forest Service or the federal – they get there. So we worked very closely with them and the USGS to establish some kind of protocol that would allow us to build on what they had already started. And so we had everything ready to go. We just didn’t have a way to fund it. And that was kind of the last piece of our – in my eyes at least – whitebark puzzle for us.

That monitoring piece kind of came last because it wasn’t that urgent. So we had all that in place, but no funding. And so the last piece came: The Dillon Field Office, almost the entire office, is identified as one of the restoration landscapes in Montana. And because of the relationships that already existed — that partnership that’s been going on for so many years — we ended up with this brand new agreement with the Montana Office to continue that work. They provide us with all the data so we can use it for (threatened species) consultations, or if we’re ever considering delisting, we need to be able to say, “This is what we have and this is what it looks like,” and we didn’t have that before. So that data is going to help us get to the point where we can say, you know, this is the state of our stands statistically.

HOWELL: I think what’s interesting about projects like this is that we can highlight the fact that BLM isn’t working in a vacuum. That (a) it takes a lot of time to get things going. But (b) there are a lot of other people involved.

GUIBERSON: So many people, so many, at all levels, and I’m very glad that we can lean on our other agencies. You know, the oversight aspect was at the very end because sometimes the focus is so much on administration that it’s the lowest priority.

HOWELL: And as you said, if you ever delist the species, it will be based only on the science and the data that you have.

GUIBERSON: And knowing that they’ve been doing this for so long, and that the data now speaks for itself! They have data that speaks for itself, whereas before it was, “Maybe they did it this way here and maybe they did it that way there, so it’s not comparable data – it’s interesting data, but it doesn’t speak for the whole spectrum.” And so I was really happy to have that last piece come in, because we had all the other pieces of it and then if we just keep putting them together, it just makes it even stronger.

NARRATOR: Long-term, the future of whitebark pine recovery is uncertain. The good news is that foresters studying this species are in it for the long haul.

GUIBERSON: I think that for everyone who’s involved in it, it’s usually not because they’ve been told they have to do it. It’s usually because they get into it and then they realize it’s really important. And then they’re in it for their whole career and even longer! A lot of people who have even retired from the business are still heavily involved in it. So I would say it’s one of those things that gets into you and changes you. And when you leave, you take it with you. It’s not something you leave at the door.

HOWELL: So it’s a mission!

GUIBERSON: It’s definitely a mission! And you know, just the partnerships that we’ve built over the years, and there are some of my closest friends because we’ve worked so much together and experienced so much. So it’s a great group of like-minded people and just overall good people who want to see change, and that’s promising.

NARRATOR: Emily Guiberson is the BLM’s forestry chief in the Montana/Dakota state office. She joined from her office in Dillon, Montana.

If you’re interested in learning more about the whitebark pine and the creatures that depend on it, I highly recommend watching a video on YouTube by the conservation group American Forests called “Hope and Restoration: Saving the Whitebark Pine.” We have a link to this episode on our website, as well as other stories we’ve published about this species.

Thanks for joining us! I’m David Howell and I’ll see you out there “on the ground.”

This story is part of the Unleashing the Science series, which shows how Interior Department offices produce and apply scientific knowledge to ensure responsible management decisions for our planet today and in the future.