Over the past 5 years, alongside partners and collaborators, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has been working on snowpack-tree canopy interactions in the Eastern Cascades.
A new video from the University of Washington (UW) entitled, Frozen Frontiers: Decoding the Snowpack of the Eastern Cascades features this interdisciplinary research team, including Cassie Lumbrazo, a Ph.D. student from UW, who is dedicated to understanding the relationship between forests and snow.
The snowpack research collaborators include TNC, UW’s mountain hydrology lab in the College of Civil Engineering, led by Dr. Jessica Lundquist, and Dr. Susan Dickerson Lange at Natural Systems Designs.
Together, we are working at the intersection of land management, water resources, and climate change to ensure that we both advance conservation science at the global level, while also providing actionable science at the local-scale.
TNC started working with Cassie four years ago when she was a masters student in Dr. Jessica Lundquist’s lab, supported and encouraged her application to NASA to collect the first snow-on LiDAR data in the Eastern Cascades, and worked with Cassie to develop and submit a project proposal to the Washington Department of Natural Resources to fund her Ph.D. research on Cle Elum Ridge.
Staff Aquatic Ecologist, Dr. Emily Howe sits on Cassie’s thesis committee, and worked with TNC staff foresters to implement the project’s experimental study design on Cle Elum ridge. The experimental design includes the installation of thinning units on both the north and south aspects of the ridge, allowing us to detect differences in snow-tree canopy interactions as a function of tree canopy cover and slope aspect, the compass orientation of a slope.
Cassie has worked to extend the plot-level data to larger landscape scales by collaborating with UW’s RAPID LiDAR team to fly a second set of snow-on lidar flights over the ridge, after forest restoration treatment.
