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Here's why Adirondack peatlands are so unique in the face of climate change | NCPR News

Here's why Adirondack peatlands are so unique in the face of climate change

Climate change is impacting every region around the world, with hotter temperatures, more extreme weather events, and biodiversity loss.

The...

Emily Russell (Adirondack Reporter), in Saranac Lake, NY

Jul 07, 2023 — Climate change is impacting every region around the world, with hotter temperatures, more extreme weather events, and biodiversity loss.

The Adirondacks offer a unique opportunity for scientists to study the effects of climate change. Steve Langdon is an ecologist from Saranac Lake whose research focuses specifically on peatlands, those colder wetland areas in the Adirondacks which play an important role in carbon sequestration. Emily RussellHere's why Adirondack peatlands are so unique in the face of climate change

STEVE LANGDON: The thing that makes the Adirondacks important, biologically, is its global position and the complex topography of the place. In terms of the global position, we're on the southern extent of boreal ecosystems and we're at the northern extent of temperate ecosystems and that's an interesting place to be. It's got the most bird diversity outside of the tropics and a complex patchwork of different types of habitats.

That's cool and unique and that's the way things have been. But the expected response of plants and animals to climate change is that they're either going to move northward if they can, or they're going to move up in elevation. If they don't have the capacity to move, they're going to blink out, disappear from our region, and in some cases, that means disappear maybe disappear globally or disappear from our region. So monitoring all of that is kind of the realm that I work in.

EMILY RUSSELL: A lot of your work focuses specifically on peatlands, and before we talk about how they're being impacted by climate change, I wonder if you could just give me an elevator pitch about why you think they're so interesting and special?

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RUSSELL: What are you seeing in terms of the impact that climate change is having on peatlands?

LANGDON: So this is the tough question. There hasn't been a ton of research on peatlands in the Adirondacks. So if we had great data from 100 years ago, we could make inferences about climate change and compare things to climate. So we have to be very creative scientifically, in sorting out what's causing changes. But we are seeing changes in the forest structure of black spruce, a tree species that dominates the boreal forest from Newfoundland to Vancouver. In the Adirondacks, it's really restricted mostly to peatlands with very few exceptions. What we found in that paper I published in 2020 in the journal Wetlands was that the black spruce forest is being encroached upon by red maple and yellow birch trees and that fundamentally changes a lot of the biogeochemical cycling over long periods of time, so it changes that aspect of peatlands for carbon sinks, but it also changes the habitat for the birds and the animals that live in those places.

RUSSELL: As a birder, what are you seeing in terms of changes to birds and bird habitats due to climate change?

LANGDON: So I've been working as a field tech on a project that's run by Michale Glennon out of Paul Smith College's Adirondack Watershed Institute. So that's been going on since about 2008/09 and every year, there's about five of us who work on this project, and we go out to different big boreal habitats, peatlands, and we listen for birds for 10 minutes at randomly selected points throughout these peatland complexes. And that work, which is a ton of data— now it's 16 years worth of data— shows that all of the bird species except two that we've been focusing on are in decline, their populations are becoming harder and harder to detect at these sites over time.

RUSSELL: Are there land management and climate mitigation lessons to be learned in the Adirondacks by regions around the country around the world?

LANGDON: I think we have a unique conservation history in the Adirondacks that can't really be replicated in all places just because of the political history of thanks but I think that if we can document and study and work in the observe part of the scientific method we can come to understand the value of these places regionally throughout the country and the continent.