ELWHA RIVER VALLEY BIODIVERSITY

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PROJECT

INTRODUCTION

In March 2008, the University of Washington and its partner institutions initiated a survey and inventory of the microorganisms and aquatic and riparian non-vascular plants and invertebrates of the Olympic National Park's Elwha River Valley adjacent to two large hydroelectric dams, the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, both of which are scheduled for demolition beginning in early 2012. The Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act of 1992 (PL 102-495) authorized the Secretary of the Interior to acquire and remove the dams, and fully restore the ecosystem and native anadromous fisheries. Removing both dams and allowing the ecosystem to recover will open up over 113 km of largely pristine salmon habitat (72 km of river, plus 41 km of tributaries; Brenkman et al., 2008). Dam removal will produce annually an estimated 390,000 salmon and steelhead in about 30 years, compared with less than 4,000 wild salmon that now spawn in the 8 km of river between the lower dam and the Strait of Juan de Fuca (Anonymous, 1994, 1995; Allaway, 2004; Duda et al., 2008). At present we know next to nothing about the biodiversity of those taxa that will be most vulnerable to change once the dams are removed—virtually no microbial, and very little non-vascular plant and invertebrate vouchered collections have ever been made (Morley et al., 2008). Without this crucial baseline data for comparison, no meaningful biological assessment of the impact of opening the river can be made (Hart et al., 2002; Pizzuto, 2002).

OBJECTIVES

Realizing the urgent need for collection of baseline data, and the scientific, educational, social, and political advantages of a detailed biotic survey of the aquatic and riparian habitats of the Elwha River Valley, faculty from diverse departments at the University of Washington (UW), the California Academy Sciences (CAS), Peninsula College (PC), and other partner organizations, have begun a biotic survey and inventory with the following primary objectives:

  1. Inventory existing collections of Elwha watershed organisms presently archived primarily at the UW Burke Museum (vascular plants, spiders, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals), CAS (insects and other invertebrates); Oregon State University (terrestrial insects), and Colorado State University (aquatic insects);
  2. Survey all aquatic and riparian habitats along the Elwha River and its major tributaries, above, between, and below the dams, focusing on microorganisms, lichens, bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), fungi, spiders, and aquatic, hyporheic, soil-dwelling, and riparian insects (vascular plants and vertebrates will not be collected, but existing data will be included in a dedicated website; see item 7 below);
  3. Sort, identify, and curate whole specimens and tissues for future study;
  4. Develop a database of collection localities, specimens, and taxa for use in later studies;
  5. Make the immediate results of the survey—databases, written information, and preserved collections—available as quickly as possible to researchers around the world;
  6. Prepare keys, guides, and annotated checklists of the Elwha Valley flora and fauna;
  7. Create a multidimensional, interactive, and heavily illustrated Elwha River Valley "Web-of-Life" on the Internet, providing access to all project information, with a full-text database search-engine and an interactive geographic information system that will combine all specimen and locality data, with dynamic internet maps as well as links to publications, presentations, student profiles and research projects, faculty and staff profiles, and other related information;
  8. Provide field experience and research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students of all participating institutions;
  9. Partner with the Olympic Park Institute—a non-profit organization "dedicated to teaching science and environmental education in nature's classroom to inspire a personal connection to the natural world and responsible actions to sustain it"—to provide monthly environmental education forays along the river for students and their teachers, grades 4-12, from Native American and non-tribal schools of the North Olympic Peninsula;
  10. Involve "Citizen Scientists," recruited through the Olympic Park Institute and the local media to participate in collection and curatorial activities, supervised by project faculty, staff, and graduate students.

RATIONAL AND SCOPE

INVENTORY OF EXISTING COLLECTIONS.—Museum collections of Elwha plants and animals are presently archived at the UW Burke Museum (plants, butterflies, spiders, fishes, birds, and mammals), CAS (insects and other invertebrates), Oregon State University (primarily terrestrial insects), and Colorado State University (aquatic insects), with smaller holdings at Western Washington University, Bellingham; Washington State University, Pullman; and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. Much of the data that documents this material is readily available and already digitized, thus retrieval and posting on an Elwha website will not be especially difficult or time-consuming. But gathering this information altogether in a searchable database, along with brief descriptions and images of representative taxa, will provide great scientific and educational value.

STUDY SITES.—We plan to survey all available aquatic and riparian1 habitats along the length of the Elwha River and its eight major tributaries (those greater than third order: the Little, Lillian, Lost, Goldie, and Hayes rivers; and Indian, Long, and Godkin creeks) from approximately 42 km above the Glines Canyon Dam—as far up-river as returning salmon are expected to migrate, spawn, and die (Brenkman et al., 2008)—to the river's mouth where it drains into the Strait of Juan de Fuca (a total distance of about 68 river km), including the 13.6-km stretch between the two dams, as well as the shores of the two reservoirs, lakes Aldwell and Mills (see Fig. 1). Habitats along the way are highly diverse, ranging from sea-level sandy-, rocky-beach, and grassland-meadow to high-mountain conifer forest; from deep slow-moving low-land river to fast-flowing gravelly rapids; and from ponds, swamps, and sphagnum bogs to high mountain lakes.

1 Our definition of "riparian" follows that used by the U.S. Forest Service (2000): a transition between the aquatic ecosystem and the adjacent terrestrial ecosystem and is identified by soil characteristics and distinctive vegetation communities that require free and unbound water. It has three dimensions: longitudinal, extending up and down streams and along the shores; lateral, to the estimated boundary of land with direct land-water interactions; and vertical, from below the water table to above the canopy of mature site-potential trees (Parrott et al., 1997).

TAXONOMIC BREADTH.—Our focus is on the smaller aquatic and closely associated terrestrial organisms that are most responsible for driving ecosystems, these being (1) relatively little collected, poorly represented in collections, and largely unknown; (2) most likely to display high levels of local endemism among subtaxa; (3) most vulnerable to change once the dams are removed; (4) more likely to provide the basis for significant future research; and (5) within the interest and expertise of personnel at the collaborating institutions. Within this selected assemblage, we are sampling microorganisms; lichens, mosses, and liverworts; mycorrhizal- and macrofungi (basidiomycetes and ascomycetes); aquatic, hyporheic, soil-dwelling, and riparian insects; and spiders. Vascular plants and vertebrates will not be collected, but existing data on these well-known taxa will be included in a dedicated website.

Microorganisms: The microbial diversity within soils, sands, and other substrata, the latter being among the most biologically diverse habitats on earth, is very poorly understood, especially the question of how variation in microbial community structure affects ecosystem function (e.g., Doran and Zeiss, 2000; Girvan et al., 2003; Wardle et al., 2004; Wardle, 2006). Despite the need for information about this most critical trophic component in freshwater and terrestrial habitats, very little work has been done world-wide (Ash et al., 2008; Falkowski et al., 2008), and essentially nothing has been done within the Elwha watershed. The only exception is recent work by Bill Eaton and his students on microbial diversity and community structure along the river as part of his NSF REU project (DBI-0452328). Among other things, his work has shown unique characteristics among the different parts of the river, above, between, and below the two dams (Eaton et al., in review). For example, the 16s rRNA and Cyanobacteria ITS clone sequence diversity between the dams was found to differ significantly from that identified above and below the dams, a relationship that correlates well with the amount of large woody debris at the different river sites, but not with the presence or absence of salmonids. Clearly, a more complete knowledge of the microbial diversity along the full length of the Elwha will be crucial to any future assessment of biotic change following the opening of the river.

Lichens: The lichens of western Washington and especially the Olympic National Park are poorly documented; little quantitative sampling has ever been done. This is especially true for the Elwha River Valley, which has never been sampled in upstream mountainous regions beyond approximately 30 river km, and on tribal and privately owned lands below the two dams. The largest void is representatives of microlichen/crustose group. A published list of lichens of the Olympic National Park includes some 600 species and 185 genera (Hutten et al., 2005), but many of these records are literature based, with no existing voucher specimens and no quantitative information. An unpublished list of lichens is available for the Elwha watershed (Jerry Freilich, pers. comm., 28 February 2008), but riparian areas, floodplainforests, and wetlands represented by bogs and fens are not adequately covered. Limited collecting as part of our current one-year SGER award has already produced 10 new records for the Elwha River Valley.

Bryophytes: Mosses and liverworts have been studied on the Olympic Peninsula, but very little inventory work has been done along the Elwha, especially in upstream mountainous regions beyond approximately 30 river km, and on tribal and privately owned lands below the two dams. Harthill (1964, 1968; see also Harthill, 1975) completed a general inventory of Olympic National Park bryophytes, and later an ecological study in the Little River drainage, tributary to the Elwha, but the results of these two studies were never published and included very limited areas within the Park. Hutten et al. (2005) published a largely plot-based bryophyte inventory of the Olympic National Park that focused primarily on major habitat types, listing specifically the Alnus rubra-dominated riparian and floodplain forests of the Elwha as needing additional survey work. A recent unpublished estimate (Jerry Freilich, pers. comm., 28 February 2008) indicates 324 bryophyte species within the Elwha River drainage, but an intensive survey effort of the kind described here will significantly increase this number. Just the limited collecting that we have been able to do as part of our current one-year SGER award has already produced 12 new records for the Elwha.

Mycorrhizal Fungi: Mycorrhizae (mutualistic associations of plant roots and fungi) are enormously important in natural ecosystems and in agriculture, providing plants with vastly expanded access to soil water and nutrients. Over 95% of all vascular plants have mycorrhizae, yet almost everywhere they remain very poorly known. While several surveys of epigeous macrofungi have been conducted in the Olympics, including extensive collections of ectomycorrhizal taxa (e.g., O'Dell et al., 1999; Trudell and Edmonds, 2004), no below-ground studies exist that focus directly on ectomycorrhizal root tips. Epigeous macrofungi surveys are valuable and effective in establishing the presence of ectomycorrhizal taxa, but they cannot assess the composition of the full mycorrhizal community (Wardle et al., 2004). In fact, it is now accepted that the abundance of fungal sporocarps rarely corresponds to abundance on the roots, especially for thelephoroid and other resupinate fungi that are poorly represented in surveys (Horton and Bruns, 2001). Therefore the full mycorrhizal community may not be detected unless roots are examined directly using morphological and molecular methods for identification. While labor intensive, these methods generally reveal a much more complete picture of mycorrhizal diversity, which will be essential in detecting future shifts in community composition resulting from dam removal. The varied terrain and high plant-species diversity of the Elwha riparian system will likely yield a highly diverse array of mycorrhizal taxa, some of which will undoubtedly be new for the region.

Macrofungi: Because of its extensive and pristine conifer forests and riparian habitats, wide moisture and temperature gradients, and sharp changes in elevation, with numerous streams and deep river valleys, the Olympic Peninsula has long been recognized as a region of high macrofungus (mushrooms, cup fungi, corals, polypores, etc.) diversity (e.g., see Kauffman, 1927). But despite a number of collecting efforts that date back to the mid-1920s (Kauffman, 1927; Smith, 1939, 1947; Smith and Hesler, 1968; Hesler and Smith, 1979; O'Dell et al., 1999; Seidl, 2000; Trudell and Edmonds, 2004; Matheny et al., 2007), we are still far from having a complete species list, very little quantitative information is available, and adequate voucher collections are lacking. A long-term, year-to-year, sustainable effort to survey, inventory, and otherwise study the fungi of this region is a crucial element in understanding the profound changes that a free-flowing river will bring.

Insects: Only a tiny fraction of the arthropod fauna of the Olympic National Park has been documented and very little of this knowledge is based on reliably identified and vouchered specimens. Most of the information comes from scattered records of a few specimens reported in the literature, without accurate locality data. Notable exceptions are the Lepidoptera and Odonata, two popular charismatic groups that are relatively easy to identify. But even for these groups, voucher specimens linking species to the Elwha are lacking (e.g., there are only four Elwha butterfly specimens in the Burke Museum collections, all of the same species; Jon Pelham, pers. comm., 22 April 2008). Of great importance are the Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPTs). Not only are these taxa used as standard environmental monitors, they are also critical elements in the diet of salmonids. Although there has been much work on EPTs in the Pacific Northwest, only a scant number of species are reported from the Park (McCafferty and Meyer, 2007). The beetle diversity of the Park has never been directly surveyed. No published studies exist on aquatic and semi-aquatic Hemiptera within the Olympic National Park; although, based on recent surveys at nearby North Cascades National Park (Lattin, 1997, 1999), a relatively high diversity can be expected. Virtually nothing is known about many other diverse groups of arthropods that live along the Elwha. Orthoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and non-insect arthropods, such as the Diplopoda, Chilopoda, Isopoda, all remain unsurveyed. With so little known about the arthropod diversity, discoveries of new records and new species are certain.

Spiders: The spider fauna of the Olympic Peninsula as a whole is very poorly known. In the last 70 years, some spider collecting has been done, but only on the drier eastern slopes of the Olympic Mountains, and even there only a small proportion of the total spider biodiversity is known. During this same period, there have been only five or six collecting trips to the Pacific coastal areas of the Peninsula, one to the interior and four or five (mostly only one-day visits) to the north side of the mountains (Crawford, online a). As for the Elwha River Valley itself, our knowledge of the spider fauna is little better than zero: a single species collected in 1964 and a litter sample with seven spider species taken during a visit of less than one hour (Maddison and Crawford, 1985). In contrast to this meager knowledge, a thorough survey of the riparian zone of the Elwha proper should produce (based on general knowledge of Washington State spider diversity; see Crawford, 1988, unpublished data) 300 or more species, of which only 2.5% or less are presently represented in collections. If tributaries to the Elwha are included, the total could be several hundred more, most likely including a considerable number of undescribed species and new state records. Limited collecting as part of our current one-year SGER award has already produced a list of 134 species, including at least one undescribed form.