Defenders Magazine

The Future of Refuges

At Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, climate change isn't a distant threat--it's a painful reality.

By Krista Schlyer

Rising temperatures have brought a host of new
challenges to our nation's system of wildlife
refuges. Those challenges are most palpable
and severe in Alaskan refuges such as Kenai,
where melting and receding glaciers, more
intense fires, insect infestations, drying wetlands
and other habitat alterations are testing the
coping abilities of resident wildlife and human
managers.

From the air, the Harding Icefield spreads an aged white hand over southern Alaska's Kenai Mountains, cracked and wrinkled by crevasses. Shallow pools sparkle like sapphires on long glacial fingers that reach down into alpine valleys. The scenery is intoxicating, but its beauty masks an illness that is changing the face and future of Alaska's Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

"When the refuge was established [in 1941], the glacier covered the edge of that lake," says Rick Johnston, piloting a Cessna and pointing to a glacial lake spreading about a mile from the tip of Tustumena Glacier. He then gestures to a rocky point that juts out into the lake about a quarter-mile from the current terminus of the glacier. "Ten years ago, it came to the edge of that rock outcropping."

Global warming has been quietly festering on the planet for more than a century, but its impacts here at Kenai refuge are abundantly clear: rising temperatures have begun melting the Harding Icefield. This stubborn remnant of the last ice age, which contains Tustumena and dozens of other glaciers, has lost about 70 feet of thickness since 1950. Johnston has been flying here for more than two decades and has witnessed the meltdown. "

You know you've been in a place a long time when glaciers have receded a couple of miles," Johnston says.

Retreating glaciers are just the tip of the iceberg at Kenai. Insect infestations are felling forests, wetlands are drying and glacial runoff is clouding lakes, threatening to erode the foundations of this ecosystem. And refuge residents like moose, Dall sheep, marten and grizzly bear are feeling the effects.

These Alaska residents are not alone: Kenai is emblematic of the huge threat that climate change poses to America's wildlife refuges. The National Wildlife Refuge System is a collection of 545 special places spread across the country, created as havens for native wild animals and plants. Already taxed by a host of other environmental challenges, along with chronic funding shortages, many of these refuges could sink under the rising tide of global warming. As a result, this year Defenders of Wildlife has focused its yearly report on the state of the refuge system, Refuges at Risk, on the threat posed by global warming (see sidebar).

For many refuges, the impacts of global warming loom on the horizon. Kenai, however, has reached that horizon. The consequences of planetary warming are most immediate here because Alaska has warmed as much as four times as fast as the rest of the nation. People here see the glaciers pulling back and rising treelines engulfing alpine tundra. As a result, refuge biologists are building a research program around understanding and coping with the realities of global warming, and have included warming in a list of issues in Kenai's comprehensive conservation plan.

Refuge ecologist Ed Berg has been tracking the largest infestation of spruce bark beetles in history, which has killed 1 million acres of old-growth white, Sitka and Lutz spruce on the Kenai Peninsula in the past 20 years. His studies show the native insect--which in normal times plays an important role in forest health by thinning out the canopy--has been emboldened by warmer temperatures.

The weather on the peninsula typically follows an El Niño/La Niña pattern, with several warm years where beetle populations thrive, followed by several cold years that stymie beetles. But global warming has altered the patterns, and in the late 1980s through the 1990s, the region experienced an 11-year run of warm summers.

The beetle infestation has changed the makeup of the boreal forest here, with almost all of the old-growth spruce standing naked or toppled in piles across the landscape. "I personally had to cut down hundreds of trees that had died--beautiful, beautiful old-growth Sitka spruce," laments Berg. Now, only a few islands of old-growth remain. "I visit them once or twice a year just to remind myself what the forest looked like before the beetles," he says.

Berg predicts that the Kenai will never again have old-growth white, Sitka and Lutz spruce. The beetles will kill them at a younger age and the forest will shift to hardwood with spruce becoming a minor component.

And with forests of spruce toppled like matchsticks, concerns about intense fires have heightened--fires like the one that burned 10,000 acres on the shore of Skilak Lake. Earlier in my aerial tour, we landed on this aquamarine lake and stepped off the plane near a sparse forest of nearly limbless charcoal trunks. My feet sank into the soft ashen forest floor where shocks of Jacob's Ladder, the forest's first new growth, shouted out in mockingly vibrant purple-- like daisies at a funeral.

This forest will likely recover in time, but it serves as one in a long list of signs of a troubling present and an uncertain future for the refuge--and its wildlife. From charred forests to shrinking alpine habitat and drying wetlands, rapid changes on the landscape have called into question whether some species, like Dall sheep, pine marten, wolverine and caribou, will be able to survive global warming's effects on the refuge.

"Other things being equal, we're going to have declining Dall sheep. We're losing their habitat," says supervisory biologist John Morton. A species unique to northwestern North America, Dall sheep live almost exclusively in alpine tundra near the rugged slopes that provide escape from their predators. But because warmer temperatures have allowed treeline in the Kenai Mountains to rise at about a meter per year over the past 50 years, the tundra is disappearing.

And while Dall sheep may find a way to move to a more suitable locale, smaller alpine species like the American marten, which is about the size of a housecat, are not as travel-ready. The marten, a member of the weasel family, depends on particular snow conditions to survive the harsh Kenai winters in insulated burrows. As snow depths and consistencies vary with warmer climates, and insect infestations and frequent fires alter the mature forest cover they depend on, marten may no longer find their current range hospitable. But they don't like to cross open areas where they are vulnerable to predators and out of range of the protective forest cover, says Andy Baltensperger, a master's student at Colorado State University who is conducting research on the marten at the Kenai refuge.

"If there's a big gap between prime habitat, they may or may not go across," Baltensperger says.

Even the moose, the species this refuge was originally created for, may not find suitable habitat here in the future. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the refuge to spare the moose from the fate that befell the Kenai population of caribou earlier in the century--elimination at the hands of settlers and trophy hunters. The moose rebounded and thrives on the peninsula today, numbering about 6,000, but changes in the landscape due to global warming could challenge the patron saint of Kenai. Moose depend on the wetland plants for their summer browse. But warmer temperatures are already drying wetland areas, a trend that is expected to worsen as the mercury climbs. And with earlier springs, moose may become vulnerable to heat stress when temperatures warm before they have shed their winter coats.

Predicting the moose's future is difficult because, like most refuges, Kenai lacks some basic ecological information, namely what species of plants and animals are present and in what numbers. Even for large species like the Kenai brown bear, which is considered a "population of concern" by the state of Alaska, accurate population counts do not exist, says Morton. And with all the changes brought by global warming, an accurate picture of what makes up the ecosystem takes on a new importance.

"How can you determine species shifts if you don't know what species are there in the first place?" Morton asks. To solve this dilemma, the refuge is working with the U.S. Forest Service to conduct long- term monitoring of plants and animals.

In addition to monitoring species, the refuge is working with the Kenai Watershed Forum, a nonprofit group, to formulate computer models of possible scenarios about how global warming, in addition to other factors like roads and rapid development, might affect land and wildlife in the future. For instance, you could ask the computer model what will happen to moose habitat in the next 50 years given expected changes in fire regime, treeline rise and wetland drying. While in its early stages, Morton hopes this research will eventually help the refuge, local officials and the public to plan for changes in the landscape due to global climate change.

He also sees the refuge's research as facilitating a wider discussion about wildlife management in an era of global warming. From the predicament of the floundering polar bear set adrift by melting sea ice, to the northward migration of iconic red maples from their home in New England, refuge managers and wildlife biologists around the country will be faced with the challenges of a changing landscape. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts a 2- to 4-foot rise in sea level over the next century along much of the coastal United States. National wildlife refuges such as Aransas in Texas, Chincoteague in Virginia and Merritt Island in Florida would see a drowning of key nesting areas for birds and turtles, and loss of habitat for countless coastal lowland species.

Wetland-dependent birds whooping cranes, endangered birds whose western population winters at Aransas refuge, could be devastated by the drowning of lowlands. And, in an ironic twist, the crane's summer nesting grounds in Canada could be threatened by warming-induced drought, says Tom Stehn, the national coordinator for whooping crane recovery.

"In wet years the nests do really well. In dry years, the nests are almost complete failures. Less rain and the whooping crane will head right toward extinction," Stehn says.

These few examples suggest complicated management decisions are in the future for refuge managers, where proposals as problematic as building walls against the sea to moving imperiled animals to new locations could be on the table.

Morton has his doubts about the approach of holding back the tide and wrangling with the effects of the warming we've caused. "New Orleans is a great example. If we can't do it for humans, how would we be able to do it for wildlife?" he asks. But at the moment, he and his team are just looking for information to help inform and ignite the debate. "We don't know what the answer is. What we want to do is kind of flesh out the discussion," he says.

As I drive away from the refuge, I try to imagine how and when that discussion might begin to take shape. I pass a local building supply store sign that Morton had pointed out to me earlier in the day. The sign has a "Quote of the Day" that reads: "Always be an optimist, at least until they start moving animals in pairs to Cape Canaveral."

Washington, D.C.-based writer and photographer Krista Schlyer traveled to Kenai refuge last summer to report this story.