And we’re off!

The starting bell for TreeFight 2012 officially rang on June 24th, when a big yellow school bus pulled up to the clock tower at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and 28 Jackson Hole High School freshmen-to-be piled out of the bus into the hot June sun.

We had an ambitious plan — to protect with verbenone 200 Whitebark pine in Rendezvous Bowl, near the 10,450-foot summit of Rendezvous Peak. This seemed like a formidable challenge to two dozen easily distractable 14 year olds. But after riding the aerial tram up, hiking to the bottom of the bowl, and dividing into teams, it took only as long as the hike to the closest whitebark for the students to embrace our challenge. Soon shouts were ringing across the the talus as students and JHHS teachers spotted new trees, hiked uphill to them, stapled verbenone pouches to their trunks, and documented their work with photos.

It ended up working like a charm — the students swarmed up the top of Rendezvous Peak and protected nearly every mature whitebark in the Bowl, receiving an education in whitebark ecology and getting some good exercise in the process.

Many thanks to the staff of Jackson Hole High School and the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival for collaborating on the organization of Bronc Prep 2012 + TreeFight 2012. It was a great way to kick off our season.

[Show as slideshow]

123►

So we’ve learned that if you try to get smartphones donated by a phone company, they require you to buy data plans. That dog won’t hunt.

Especially since old smartphones equipped with wifi work great for what we want to do, which is take geo-tagged pictures and post them to treefight’s instagram account and add them to our visual database for monitoring. (Yes, old iPhones without wireless plans receive GPS signals. Does anybody know if Androids do?)

We would love to find 10 old smartphones that take decent-quality geo-tagged photos and can be loaded with instagram. Iphone 3G, 3Gs, 4, and 4s all work great. I’m not sure about Androids but I’m sure plenty of them can do this.

If you have one of these phones, please consider donating it or lending it to TreeFight! We need them desperately! Even if it has a broken screen. We can fix those.

If you donate a phone, you’ll be provided a receipt for a deduction on your income taxes. You decide on the value of your own phone.

If you can donate or lend us your old smartphone, please send us an email. Thanks!

JHHS Bronc Prep 2011

June 21
Location: JHMR
Protect, Monitor, Create
20 spaces

Register for this mission:

Wherein Pepi proves his proficiency as TreeFight’s first citizen scientist, testing presence/absence of squirrel populations in the Winds and the southern Absarokas.

Time to start TreeFighting again.

We’ve honed our plan, marshalled our resources, and fished the bear spray out of storage.

We’ve got seedlings to plant, whitebark to protect, nutcrackers to track, art to make, parties to throw, and many miles of hiking in the high alpine ahead of us.

Today was our first ‘mission,’ as the 12-year-old WWII fighter pilot buff in me likes to call them. We headed out with Taza, our intrepid Cornell ornithologist, to set up a monitoring station, where throughout this summer, we’ll watch and listen for the avian architects of the forest, clark’s nutcrackers, whose importance to our keystone species (whitebark don’t reproduce without their help) mean their population dynamics are damned important.

Mostly today we picnicked in a meadow surrounded by pines, under a banging bluebird sky, and discussed how to turn two 15.2-meter lengths of cord into one length of cord exactly 25 meters long, without a ruler or measuring tape. Miss Just-Took-My-GREs thinks she had a better method than me. Phhhfft.

Please, join us on a treefight mission this summer. It’s a good time to fight for your forest.

According to a 2009 aerial survey, in the last decade the whitebark pine forests in 16 of 22 mountain ranges of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have experienced moderate to severe mortality due to uncharacteristically severe beetle infestations. The loss to whitebark has been significant enough to warrant a 2011 finding by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that Pinus Albicaulis meets the criteria for a threatened or endangered species. Because of whitebark’s critical role in this world heritage ecosystem, we feel it’s imperative to A) document and publicize these changes and their effects, B) take direct action in the protection, monitoring and restoration of these vital forests, and C) facilitate public participation in such actions, particularly by students.

Our goals are direct and measurable. Working with the U.S. Forest Service and other partners, we are protecting and restoring whitebark in specific areas, and with Cornell University, collecting population observations on whitebark-dependent bird species, while also testing the integrity of citizen science data.

Read more about our projects:

Replant

Protect

Monitor

Create

Join a mission!

In its first two years (2010 and 2011), TreeFight generated significant public interest and numerous citations in local, regional, and national media. This is a partial list.

JH Weekly piece on our first symposium, on April 22, 2010.

JH News and Guide piece on our 2010 summer activities.

Video piece by the United States State Department about TreeFight, September, 2010.

Blog piece on TreeMiere event, Jan. 2011.

TreeFight Citizens on the Front Line, video by Assignment Earth, Jan. 2011.

Our video, Seeing Red, which premiered at TreeMiere, on Jan. 14, 2011.

“Fight Club for Greenies,” Mountain Magazine, Spring, 2011.

Fighting for the Whitebark, Jackson Hole Magazine, Fall 2011.

TreeFighters battle beetles one pine at a time, The Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 22, 2011.

Volunteers help place patches on pine beetle fight in Wyoming, Casper Star-Tribune, August 8, 2011.

Public presentation at TEDx Jackson Hole

Feature in High Country News, Dec. 12, 2011.

New, bigger army sets out to smash beetles, Casper Star-Tribune, Dec. 28, 2011.

Interview on Wyoming PBS, January, 2012.

This year TreeFight has been invited by Caribou-Targhee National Forest and Bridger-Teton National Forest to replant 2,500 whitebark pine on the forest lands within the permitted boundaries of Grand Targhee Mountain Resort, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and in selected locations near the Continental Divide on Togowotee Pass.

This is completely absolutely amazingly freaking cool. We get to plant seedlings of Yellowstone’s most magical trees, which have been doted over by their germinators and caretakers at the US Forest Service Nursery in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, into the mountaintops above our homes. And they may outlive us by, oh, a THOUSAND YEARS.

Treefighters will be doing two plantings, each lasting a few days, in June and in September.

Presently, we have space for those who would like to plant trees with us on June 24th at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and on June 27th at Grand Targhee MOuntain Resort. To register for either of these missions, go to the In the Field page, or click on the appropriate dates on the calendar or list of upcoming events in the sidebar to register.

We may have more public planting dates in September, 2012. We’ll post them as soon as we can.

TreeFight was founded in November, 2009 with the idea of recruiting volunteers to help staple verbenone pouches, which deter mountain pine beetles, to the trunks of whitebark. Following the lead of ecologists Kelly McKlosky and Nancy Bockino at Grand Teton National Park, who have been applying pheromone pouches to thousands of whitebark pine in GTNP since 2007, TreeFight gathered more than 100 volunteers in the summer of 2010 to apply 600 pheromone pouches to as many trees across Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, an exemplary agency partner, welcoming and encouraging our services since we started.

2010 results: less than 5% of trees we protected in 2010 died due to beetle attack. This could have been the result of several factors, including a brief but hard cold snap in mid-October 2009, which might have significantly affected beetle reproduction and activity in 2010, but results were promising enough that in 2011, we recruited even more public and student volunteers to protect 1,000 whitebark pine.

We are checking these pines’ health in spring 2012, and in the summer, will again protect these 1,000 whitebark pine.

To register for any of our open student or public protect/monitor/create missions, go to the In The Field page, or click on the green dates in July and August on the calendar or the list of events in the sidebar to register. Generally, we’re reserving Mondays for area students and Tuesdays for the public at large, but if you have a group that would like to participate in a TreeFight mission on a particular day, please contact letshike /at/ treefight /dot/ org.

In an innovative collaboration between TreeFight and the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, our 2012 treefighters will observe and gather data on clark’s nutcracker populations in numerous points in the GYE, and then Cornell researchers will repeat those observations in the same places on subsequent days. The surveys will be done in conjunction with our replanting and protection missions.

The goals of this project are to: A) monitor nutcracker populations in a spectrum of healthy to dead whitebark forests, and B) compare citizen scientist data with professionally gathered data, to improve protocols and methods carried out by volunteers.

Our Cornell/TreeFight study has been engineered and is being administered by Taza Schaming, Cornell Lab of Ornithology Graduate student extraordinaire.

To register for any of our open student or public protect/monitor/create missions, go to the Missions page, or click on the green dates in July and August on the calendar or the list of events in the sidebar to register. Generally, we’re reserving Mondays for area students and Tuesdays for the public at large, but if you have a group that would like to participate in a TreeFight mission on a particular day, please contact letshike /at/ treefight /dot/ org.