Climate change is driving shifts in subalpine plant communities, as species migrate from lower elevations and changing temperatures and snowmelt alter other competitive and environmental factors that affect these unique plant communities. Helping subalpine species cope with these climate impacts requires protecting intact, high-elevation habitats and restoring areas degraded by human activity.

High foot traffic on popular hiking trails can result in trampled areas with no vegetation remaining. Subalpine vegetation is particularly sensitive to trampling impacts because high-elevation ecosystems have a very short snow-free growing season and can have relatively undeveloped soil for plant growth, which slows recovery. For decades, Mt. Rainier National Park has been restoring trampled areas in Paradise Meadows, one of its most heavily visited areas, by planting native meadow plants. Although planting has been effective, recovery is slow, and as climate change drives hotter and drier summers, more heat waves, and less snowpack, revegetating trampled areas is expected to become even harder.

To address these challenges, Allie is working with Mt. Rainier National Park on a project to test new restoration practices that could help meadow plant communities reestablish faster in warmer and drier conditions. Allie is using an ongoing restoration experiment to learn if mulching plantings or varying planting density could help restore trampled areas more efficiently and to determine if plugs of some species are more successful than others. 

The soil in subalpine areas may also store seeds representing a diverse array of species that are genetically adapted to local conditions and could provide a valuable addition to the National Park Service restoration toolkit. Allie aims to learn which species’ seeds are present in the soil in both trampled and adjacent, intact areas at different elevations in Paradise Meadows to determine if the soil seed bank could be used as a source of seeds for restoration. As species are predicted to migrate upwards in elevation as climate changes at Mt. Rainier, comparing soil seed bank communities across elevations will provide insights about how soil seed banks may change as the planet warms. Stimulating germination from a diverse and abundant soil seed bank in trampled areas, or sourced from intact areas and applied to trampled ones, could be an economical way to increase the species diversity and adaptive capacity of restored areas. These insights will be shared with Mt. Rainier scientists as a report to inform whether the soil seed bank could be used as a valuable tool in trampled area restoration.