Inside CU's world-class alpine research center

Today, we’re taking a trip to CU Boulder’s Mountain Research Station. This little plot of land in the Indian Peaks Wilderness operated by CU’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) is one of the longest running high elevation research centers in the world. This summer, they’re celebrating 100 plus years of groundbreaking research by opening its doors to the public. 

First, we'll hear from INSTAAR on the history of the Mountain Research Station. After that, we meet three scientists with upcoming public seminars at the station who are doing groundbreaking research that could soon influence your local community.

Also

• Timberline Fire Protection District unveils new station
• Central City Opera launches renovation project for historic stables

Check out the full schedule of seminar speakers here: colorado.edu/mrs/current-events/summer-seminar-series

Learn more about INSTAAR's 75th anniversary and sign up for alerts here: colorado.edu/instaar/about-instaar/75th-anniversary

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_07 0:01

Sometimes it feels like science happens behind a wall a hundred feet high and a mile thick. It can be hard to understand, and a lot of the time we just kind of have to take a scientist's word for it. They did the research, so they've got the answers. But have you ever wanted to see it up close? Not at a museum, but real research done by real people with the potential to change how we look at the world. A small cabin outside Netherland that happens to be a world-class climate research center lets you do just that. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Today, we're taking a trip to CU Boulders Mountain Research Station. This little plot of land in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, operated by CU's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, is one of the longest-running high-elevation research centers in the world. This summer, they're celebrating a hundred-plus years of groundbreaking research by opening its doors to the public. What is it that makes this place so important to global climate science? We'll hear straight from the Institute about that later on. After that, we're going to tear down that wall between us and science and hear from three researchers whose studies could potentially change the ways we look at ecology, climate change, and conservation in our own community. Before we get to this week's top headlines, here's a word from one of our sponsors, Central City Opera. The 94th Central City Opera Festival opens June 27th. Since 1932, Central City Opera has been one of Colorado's favorite arts traditions, bringing world-class talent to a 19th-century opera house in historic Central City. This summer, CCO is celebrating the 70th anniversary of our world premiere of the Ballad of Baby Doe. The show tells the scandalous historical love story of silver baron Horace Tabor, who left his wife Augusta for Baby Doe. The original performance rocked Denver society and today remains a staple of Colorado history. You can also catch the marriage of Figaro, Masterclass, and CCO in concert this season, the cast featuring talent from the Met, San Francisco Opera, and beyond. The festival runs June 27th through August 2nd. Tickets start at $32, and seats are going fast. Visit centralcityopera.org to learn more. Now, let's get to our top stories. The fire district hopes a modernized station will improve response times to structure and wildland fires in Rollinsville. The historic Central City Opera is getting a facelift of its own down the Peak to Peak Highway. CCO launched a multi-phase renovation project of the 150-year-old Williams stable on Eureka Street. Work begins this summer to turn the building into a hundred-seat black box theater and year-round cultural venue. The opera plans to use this space for live theater, opera, and music to expand the annual festival beyond its typical summer months. As always, you can read these stories and so much more in this week's print edition or at the mtnear.com. Now, we're going to dive into our feature segment. We'll start off with a conversation I had with a good friend of mine. Yeah, my name's Gabe Allen. I'm the senior communications specialist at InStar. Gabe and I go way back. We went to J School together at CU, and now he's working on spreading the word about just how integral InStar and this research station are to climate research.

SPEAKER_06 4:13

Basically means I'm a one-man communications team for this diverse and thriving institute.

SPEAKER_07 4:19

One of the things that one of the reasons why we're doing this is because InStar has a pretty big anniversary coming up, 75 years. What's planned for the like actual anniversary date and what are some of the events that are surrounding it?

SPEAKER_06 4:34

Yeah, so we have been doing events all year. And now this summer we're sort of shifting to the Mountain Research Station, which is our sort of most active local operation. This summer we're going to have an open house at the Mountain Research Station on August 19th. And we also have a summer seminar series. A bunch of scientists are going to come and give talks about ecology and other topics. And we have a series of natural history nature walks that people can sign up for. And we also have a to be announced film screening series. One of our affiliates is James Baylog, who made the film Chasing Ice that people may know. He will be helping us organize a film screening series that's also part of our 75th anniversary events.

SPEAKER_07 5:22

Mountain Research Station, in and of itself, is kind of a unique place, it feels like. And it's in the backyard of Netherland. I don't know. It's just so cool to have something so close by where groundbreaking research is happening on a pretty regular basis, just right here in the Indian Peak Wilderness.

SPEAKER_06 5:41

Yeah, yeah, it's a remarkable site. We actually just uh last year, a private donor um donated another piece of land up Left Hand Canyon, and that's the Spruce Sculch Wildlife and Research Reserve. And so now we have this amazing opportunity to have these two off-campus research like field locations, one in a foothills ecosystem that's really different from this mountain ecosystem, which we've been doing research at for 106 years. And yeah, this foothills location opens up a whole new avenue to get some research going that's really relevant to the lower elevations of Boulder County.

SPEAKER_07 6:22

InStar itself is like a transcontinental research center with a focus on Arctic and Alpine regions. In a nutshell, what is like this like large body of research that takes place all over the world? What does it do to help kind of inform our understanding of these types of environments?

SPEAKER_06 6:44

InStar is a really uh it's a really hard institute to sort of encapsulate in a in a short blurb because we do so much. But you know, our sort of historic areas of focus are our cold regions. That's like the Arctic and Alpine in the name. Um, climate history, so looking back into Earth's past and understanding how things developed. And then that sort of dovetails into something that's an emerging area of focus for us, which is predictive models of climate. And those are often informed by that deep history work. But I think in recent years, sort of these emerging areas of focus are a lot around climate change. So, like hazards induced by climate change, climate mitigation, and the efficacy of different climate mitigation strategies. And yeah, those predictive models and also water quality and availability. That was a great nutshell.

SPEAKER_07 7:39

Which I mean, it's it's it's like you said, it's it's hard to encapsulate like everything that InStar does because it's so influential and it has such a long history. I know that it's so this is 75 years for InStar, and the Mountain Research Station has been operating for almost 30 years longer, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. What's what's like the relationship between the two? How did like Mountain Research Station come about? And at what point did it kind of get looped into InStar, which I think is the university's oldest research institute, right?

SPEAKER_06 8:17

Yeah, InStar is CU's oldest institute. And yeah, the Mountain Research Station is even older, and the origins of the station go back really far. Let's see, in 1909, Francis Ramillet, who was this biologist, a CU Boulder professor and biologist, he established uh what he called the Mountain Laboratory. And that's that was in Tolland, Colorado, which people might know it's this, it's almost a ghost town. I think there's still some people living there. Um, but it's down that road if you go to the Moffitt Tunnel. That spot was the site of this sort of field science camp. After about a decade, it sort of transitioned to bringing in more sort of uh outdoor recreation programs to it. One of the founders of the Colorado Mountain Club actually uh started a like outdoor recreation program there. And then in 1920, they moved to the site of the current mountain research station. And yeah, in 1921, they built the first buildings there and they started it's sort of started transitioning back to like a real research-focused uh camp. Yeah, I think one of the really interesting pieces of history here is this guy, John Maher, who came along in the early 50s and established InStar at the mountain research station. So they were sort of synonymous at that point. He had this idea that he was really passionate about that if we could understand sort of the harsh conditions that are present in the winter in these alpine environments high up in the mountains, if we could understand those conditions, then it would tell us a lot about the organisms and the ecosystem that thrived there. Like what are the limitations that they have to deal with at the harshest time of year? And so he had this kind of single-minded focus to get that research program going. And he scrapped together funding from all of these wild places. One of them was from the US quartermaster general from the US Army to test all of this mountain gear for the Army. So it was like these big tank-looking vehicles and like parkas and stuff like this. So, yeah, just to get this ecological research program going, he's he's bringing in funding from wherever he can. He also got funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to study the effects of nuclear fallout in the high alpine. And he sort of scrapped together this program, which eventually turned into InStar. And yeah, the rest is history. There was uh a number of different evolutions that led to InStar evolving from this sort of scrappy alpine research program to what it is today. Very savvy, leverage atomic research grant funding just to look at what kind of bugs can live at 10,000 feet. I love it. It's wild. There's some real through lines to like some of that early research, like iterations of that are still going to this day. And they have these crazy long backlogs of just monitoring or different research programs that that they can draw and they can say, you know, we have a researcher, Chris Ray, who right now is one of the experts, you know, world-leaning experts on the American pica. So yeah, the little cute little uh rodent-looking things up in the high alpine that make those squeaks. So she, you know, she can go back to research from the 1950s, some of the earliest studies of these animals and pull from that knowledge. And that's really the benefit of having a station like this that with that deep history is that the research that's happening today, they they get to benefit from this really long record of important research at the same site, you know, with the exact same conditions. Can someone just roll up to the mountain research station and say, hey, I'd like to take a look around? You can you can come to the mountain research station, the MAR lab. We have a little display uh about some of the research and history. I think the best way to come to the mountain research station as a member of the public is to come to one of these Wednesday seminars. They're at 7 p.m. most Wednesdays this summer, or come to one of the guided natural history ecology talks that happen on Saturdays throughout the summer.

SPEAKER_07 12:41

Kind of a segue into that as a part of InStar's anniversary. You have an open house for folks to come and see the mountain research station on August 19th and a seminar speaker who's going to be there. What can we expect from that open house?

SPEAKER_06 13:00

Yeah, so this is a ticketed event, and there's a number of sort of like sub-ticketed events. So be sure to check out our news page, our events page for updates on those. Just to give you a rundown of the day. This is a celebration both of InStar's 75th anniversary and of the mountain research station's 106th. Uh, we kind of missed the 100th anniversary because it was mid-COVID. So we're celebrating now. And yeah, we've got a bunch of stuff going on that day. We'll start out for the early risers with a really early morning hike to Nywat Ridge. So Niwat Ridge is the site of the Nywat Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research Program. It is the longest-running National Science Foundation grant period ever. It shares that with four other NSF-funded LTERs. But yeah, it's a really amazing site of ecological research, and it's way up on the tundra above the tree line on this beautiful ridge, and you have this backdrop of the Indian peaks, um, some glaciated peaks back behind it. Then in the afternoon, there's going to be a sort of open house visit with researchers in the Kiowa classroom and lab, which is one of the buildings up there. People can just drop in, we'll have some hands-on activities, and you can talk to people who are up at the MRS this summer doing current ongoing research. In the afternoon, we also have a hike to C1, which is one of our climate and weather stations. So that's one of those places where atmospheric samples are gathered, as well as a bunch of other sort of weather and climate metrics, including a snowtell site, um, which is a network of these sensors sensing the snowpack around the west. Later on in the afternoon, we'll also have campus tours. So you can come and drop in on one of these tours and get guided around the MRS facilities and what goes on there. And then we'll have a dinner, and then we'll end the evening with a summer seminar with Dr. Katie Sooting. Katie is an eminent ecologist and has a thriving lab here at CU. Sweet.

SPEAKER_07 15:12

Sounds like just like a really fun day where you can nerd out a little bit. I think it's a great opportunity for anybody to go and just learn about the region that you live in, too, and everything that that INSTAR and the Mountain Research Station does to inform scientific research. And we'll hear from a couple of those seminar speakers up next. Closing thoughts here. Is there anything else important about InStar that we should know that we haven't covered yet?

SPEAKER_06 15:43

Yeah. So research at InStar and at the Mountain Research Station is it's driven by curiosity and it's done in service of a thriving world. These people are really, really passionate about what they do and they're willing to go down the deepest rabbit holes in pursuit of knowledge about how this earth system works. These events that we're hosting this year are really great opportunity to interface with those people. And I know they're really excited to bring in more members from the public in on what they're doing and ask you what you're curious about and get you curious about some of the work that we do. Just highly encourage people to take a look at our events this year, see how they want to get involved, and also stay up to date with research coming out of the institute through our news page and our social media. We'd we'd love to hear from you and see you at our events this summer.

SPEAKER_07 16:47

Now that we've got some background on the MRS, we're going to hear from the researchers themselves. Going into these interviews, I was surprised how closely tied their research is to our local peak-to-peak community. Their studies have real-world implications that could eventually help us make conservation decisions in our own backyard. First up is Kai Kopecki, who's had an interesting journey from scuba diving to studying dead trees in the Indian peaks.

SPEAKER_05 17:16

I am actually a marine biologist by training, and I kind of have taken a little bit of a I don't know, an interesting detour in my career to become to come out to the Rocky Mountains and do what we call data science, which is or using existing data sets to answer new ecological questions. And sometimes that allows you to answer ecological questions on like a much bigger scale than you would be doing if you were just kind of setting up an experiment yourself. A big theme of uh my research in general is looking at how organisms continue to have these lasting influences in their environments after they die. And it's a term we refer to as ecological memory. So anytime an organism dies, you know, a tree falls over the woods, coral dies on a reef. Even though the organism is dead, its physical structure is still there and can sort of serve these lasting ecological roles, influence ecological processes and interactions between species and things like that. I'm really interested in looking at how a particular type of organism called foundation species, how their dead remains influence ecological processes. And so foundation species are really kind of just like everywhere. You there um there are these types, these types of organisms like trees or corals or grasses or oysters that make the physical infrastructure of entire ecosystems. So if you think about a forest, it's primarily composed of trees, and then everything else within a forest lives sort of in and amongst those trees. But then the trees also provide a lot of other types of services like keeping the microclimates and the understory nice and uh moderate. They prevent soils from like being stripped away by rains. Foundation species are probably something you interact with on a even on a daily basis. When they die, they can have these really long-lasting influences. But sometimes they can benefit an ecosystem, make it more resilient, and sometimes they can cause disadvantages or detriments to an ecosystem and sort of prevent it from recovering after something like a an extreme climate event, like a drought or a heat wave or a forest fire or something like that. Like literally the moment they would walk out the door from that seminar room in at the mountain research station, you'd they're gonna be like confronted with foundation species, both live and dead. They're gonna walk out the door and see like aspen trees, pine trees, you know, both standing and fallen, pine needles on the ground, leaves, branches, and stuff like that. And probably just like be hit with like, oh wow, this stuff really is all around us, both the living ones and the dead ones, both of which are like really actively shaping how these ecosystems um are structured and how they function.

SPEAKER_07 20:02

You can hear Kai breathe life into these dead trees at his talk on July 1st, next Wednesday. We're going topical with our next researcher, artificial intelligence. It's not often you hear AI and conservation used positively in the same sentence, but Cassie Bueller is working to change that narrative. She says with the help of a tool she's developing, communities will be able to make really important conservation decisions without needing PhDs in data science.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

My background's actually in applied math and computer science, but my research is at the intersection of conservation policy, mathematical optimization, and AI. I'll be presenting an AI tool that I built. It's an interactive chatbot that responds to questions with tables, charts, and maps. And specifically, I want to talk about how we've applied this tool to support our different conservation projects and partnerships. They span from the state to international scale. We've worked with the state of California on their 30 by 30 initiative.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

New at six, Governor Gavin Newsom's 30 by 30 initiative is taking shape. State leaders meant to see just how close we are to conserving 30% of California's lands and coastal waters by 2030.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

All the way up to supporting the implementation of the United Nations High Seas Treaty, which is a UN treaty to protect biodiversity in international waters. AI is very polarizing. There are legitimate concerns about AI, specifically its environmental impact and its privacy risks, but there's a lot of nuance. So I wanted to present how our team has adopted AI with our partners. Specifically, we use open models, we use locally hosted models that have lower environmental impact. Being conservationists, the environment is top of mind. So this is very important to us. I want to share how we've been able to adopt it. We want to show it's very helpful for practitioners. Because the people who know these regions best aren't necessarily trained in data science. So our tool allows them to work with their data directly. They can talk to their data, ask it questions. And our goal going into this is democratizing conservation planning, you know, lowering that technical barrier to data exploration. The idea was sparked off of we were working with California's 30 by 30 initiative and we were writing a report assessing how well their protection efforts were going. And we were thinking we use 52 data sets to synthesize this report, but it's a static report. And what if the decision maker has a question about something that's not explicitly answered in this report, but we have the data to answer? I think that was our goal, is like accompanied with our report. Let's let's send out this tool as well, in order for, you know, decision makers to dig deeper into it because we cannot anticipate every single question. We can't do every single bar chart in advance. It's really important that these decision makers are allowed to ask questions themselves. AI is not a monolith. There are legitimate concerns, but AI is a spectrum and there's so much nuance. So I want to show how we've been able to responsibly use AI with our conservation partners.

SPEAKER_07 23:13

Cassie is set to speak on Wednesday, July 22nd. I'm personally really interested in this one, so I might just see you there. We're gonna end on a pretty complex topic here, so pay attention. Nick Terasevich is gonna throw words like lidar and long wave radiation at you. Trust me, it's not as confusing as it sounds.

SPEAKER_04 23:32

Trees and water is kind of my obsession in the world.

SPEAKER_07 23:35

I think that's the that's the easiest way to describe everything. Remarkably, the tech he's developing could eventually help local land managers, think your town border, fire protection district, decide where fire mitigation should be a priority.

SPEAKER_04 23:57

But the the gist of it comes from something that everyone who lives where we get to live is familiar with, which is the water that we drink comes from snow, often in mountains. People have sometimes described these mountains as water towers, right? They're the batteries of water for everything that we do. And under changes to the climate and shifting patterns and the way we use these resources mean that all of a sudden, while we're not necessarily seeing a decrease in annual uh amount of water, the amount that falls as winter snow has been shifting, specifically mostly in a decline.

SPEAKER_02 24:39

Yeah, that's right. Certainly not looking good this summer when it comes to our water supply. Certainly no snow where we are today in the foothills. And in fact, a lot of the slopes in the foothills and the mountains of Colorado are bare this season.

SPEAKER_04 24:55

And for all these forests that accumulate the snow and rely on it to grow, if the snow starts melting sooner than these trees are ready to take advantage of that snow melt, all of a sudden you're you're seeing uh uh stress applied to trees. And that in that leads to things like increased likelihood of uh bark beetle and uh beetle outbreaks, more wildfire susceptibility, stress in general. What I'm kind of interested in is honing into just one component of that, which is this idea of the energy that plants need in order to survive and how that interacts with snow. Plants grow using sunlight as their energy, but at the same time, there's a lot more to the different types of energy. And what I'm interested in is being able to understand those types of energy better. So shortwave radiation and long wave radiation is typically how they're referred to. And when it comes to snow melt, long wave radiation plays a huge role in how quickly snow melts out in the springtime and specifically where. And all of those questions have a lot to do with how we understand forest canopies and arrangements. I combine a combination of work with LIDAR, so taking a drone and flying it over this entire area that of study, being able to represent the canopy from the forest in three dimensions, and then doing some f fan fancy solar physics modeling in order to understand exactly where the sun's making it through. And the whole goal of that is to get at this idea of better understanding how energy is working through these elements at really fine scales. So that gives you a really useful tool for forest managers and scientists to really start to get at this idea of what compositions and arrangements of trees and forests are more susceptible or less susceptible to early snow melt? How is that changing over time? If it's changing at all, how's it responding to everything that we're experiencing around us today? I think I think it's pretty common for a lot of people to hear in the news is like hot topic items of climate models predict, or Model X says this.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

These are the things that climate models have always predicted would happen, right? More and more of these extreme fluctuations.

SPEAKER_04 27:17

And the perspective that at least uh I like to take with all of the modeling, especially related to climate change, models aren't meant to be able to tell us exactly what's going to happen in the future. What they're supposed to do is help us understand the limits of our knowledge for these systems and then be able to help suggest what are the ranges of potential outcomes. And by having that range of things that are more likely or less likely to happen, that's where you're where land managers and uh everyone are able to actually make informed decisions with limited resources that we all have nowadays in order to actually make as informed choices as possible. A lot of my work is really focused on the local, like local areas, local communities, what local neighborhoods. So my hope would be this would be a useful way to understand what areas are being impacted the most and what areas are likely to be a bit more resilient to the changes that are happening, and being able to collaborate with land managers, combining them with uh snow and water models to help better plan water management for our communities in the front range, plan better forestry responses in terms of oh, these trees may or may not be more susceptible for uh you know stress and drought impacts, and maybe we need to prioritize some fire mitigation here or collaborate with other ecologist work. But I also feel there's a level of practicality to it, too, because a lot of a lot of these big pricing issues like climate change and changes in land use and land management, they demand this beautiful balance between uh large-scale national and state-wide responses, but they also need communities need to be able to make informed decisions for the local areas as well as anything else.

SPEAKER_07 29:11

Nick will be speaking July 15th. He let me know a lot of the talk will be geared towards how we choose to respond to ongoing climate change. And in case you're worried, he promised there won't be any math. That's all for today. Huge thanks to Gabe, Kai, Cassie, and Nick for speaking with me for the show. There is so much we didn't get to cover, so go and listen to them in person. These seminars are happening throughout the summer, and there's no shortage of science-y topics to spark your curiosity. We'll drop a link to the full schedule in the show notes. If you liked today's episode, or you want to convince a friend to go check out the MRS with you this summer, please share it around. It's the best thing you can do to support the show. As always, you can like and subscribe to our show wherever you listen and get the news the moment it hits the airwaves. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.