Courtesy of Dr. Jordon Tourville.
Talking with the AMC Research team in the summer is no small feat. Summer is field season, meaning the team is outside all day, every day, collecting water samples, downloading data from remote mountain sensors, and cataloging rare alpine plants. Luckily, the research team is passionate about sharing what they do with others. I was able to catch Dr. Jordon Tourville, a former AMC Ken Kimball Fellow and the Research team’s new Terrestrial Ecologist, early one morning before he headed out into the field to talk about his new position, all things alpine zone, and AMC research.
As the Ken Kimball Fellow, Jordon focused on treeline shifts in the alpine zone and plant phenology (life cycle) changes along the Appalachian Trail in response to climate change. Moving into his new position, he’ll be able to expand upon his previous work and engage with new projects. AMC’s Research team does the on-the-ground work to collect the scientific data that informs our Policy team, increasing AMC’s outreach and impact on conservation.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
I was wondering if we could start with how you became involved with the AMC.
So I actually met some folks from the research department at a conference back in 2020. I met Sarah [Nelson, Director of AMC Research] there, and I was really interested in the work AMC was doing.
I didn’t know that much about AMC before. I just knew about the huts. I was excited to hear they did work in really cool places, so I dug a little deeper, talked to Sarah more, and I actually ended up doing one of my [PhD] dissertation chapters collaborating with the AMC. I was looking at treeline shifts in the Northeast, using old imagery that AMC had, and from there that sort of springboarded me into a postdoc position, which was the Ken Kimball Research Fellow position.
When the Terrestrial Ecologist position came online, I knew I wanted to apply for it. I thought it was a good opportunity to continue working on the projects I had started and making more connections with people who are experts in this field in the region. I’m looking forward to being able to keep pushing to do more exciting work in this area.
When did you start working in the alpine zone?
That’s kind of been present with me my entire life.
The first hike I ever did was up Mount Mansfield in Vermont. I was pretty young, and I was hooked on hiking from that moment on. Being in the alpine zone was part of the mystique of that. You get past the treeline and everything opens up. There’s beautiful views and then the vegetation is just very different.
One of the core questions in ecology is understanding why things exist where they do. And I think even at that early age, I had this curiosity to understand, ‘Why?’ Why is this like this and not like it is down lower?
Fast forward to my PhD, and I’ve come to understand that not only [are alpine zones] special, but the alpine zone in the Northeast region is also very special.
There’s still a lot of research [questions for] the alpine. We know nothing about what’s going on in the soils. We don’t know what fungi live there. We don’t know how climate will shape what this ecosystem looks like in the future. I mean, we have theories, but there’s really no good modeling or testing of what’s going on.
So it’s a perfect area for someone who’s really curious about what’s happening in this very unique ecosystem. And I think what we have here is very special on a global scale.
Dr. Tourville, at work in the alpine zone.
Are there a few things you can point to that make the alpine zone in the Northeast, or even just the White Mountains, different from the alpine zone out West or in the European Alps?
So the underlying geology of these areas are very different. Even within the Northeast region, you’ll see massive differences between the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, and the Whites. No two peaks are exactly alike, and they have their unique character.
The weather patterns that we experience in the Northeast alpine are very different from other places in the world. It’s well known that Mount Washington is home to ‘the worst weather on Earth.’ That’s due to a perfect storm, pardon the pun, of conditions. The conditions are very extreme in these places. The plants that exist there are on the bitter edge of what they can tolerate.
And other things are pretty noticeable. For instance, the location of treeline in the Northeast. You might find it at 4000-ish feet, whereas in the western U.S. that treeline elevation might be 10,000 or 11,000 feet. The same in the Alps.
Can you tell me about some of the alpine projects that you’re working on right now?
One of the big, outstanding questions that we have is understanding how plant communities and the alpine zone will change as a result of human– caused climate change.
Warming is thought to be a big driver of changes in plant composition. So this goes into wanting to know if the alpine zone will persist in the future in a warmer world. What we see in other areas is that warming causes sort of this shrub-ification of the landscape. What you get instead of these nice alpine lawns are dense thickets of shrubs. One particular project we have is resurveying old [study] plots to see what’s changing.
Another thing that we look at is forest encroachment. We have evidence to suggest that tree lines are slowly creeping up slope to the detriment of alpine species. That project involves a lot of remote sensing work.
I’ve also started a project where I’m directly measuring growth of trees at treeline. [I want to see] if warmer temperatures are causing these trees to increase growth rates and be able to reach maturity faster. That [research] involves putting these little tiny devices on trees called dendrometers to measure growth rates.
Our hope is that by understanding where changes are happening and how fast they’re happening, we can inform management to protect areas of special biological diversity. We can let the [White Mountain National] Forest Service know what we’re seeing, [and] brainstorm ideas on how to counteract that.
We can tell policymakers that there’s a problem and we can point to the evidence. At the end of the day, it requires some sort of collective action to do something about it.
You have a paper on your work coming out soon, right?
Two papers, yes! One is the phenology project I just discussed with you. The results from that will be in the journal Ecology.
The second one is about fungal work. That one was just accepted in Ecological Monographs.
Okay, final question. You said that part of the reason you wanted to be at AMC was because the Research Department has a culture you really like. What is that culture?
Extremely supportive, and very excited, and very nerdy.
I have to give a shout-out to Sarah [Nelson]. When I came on, she encouraged me to pursue basically anything I was personally interested in, and that’s not something you would find at an academic institution.
She basically said, ‘Here are the resources we have. Go wild.’
Everyone else on the team is very willing to help you out, no matter what project needs to be done. They’re willing to jump in and back you up in whatever way they can. Everyone’s very good at giving feedback — in talks, for papers, or grant proposals. We often find ourselves in lengthy conversations about some sort of project or research idea. We nerd out very hard. It’s nice.