National Park Service takes steps to protect whitebark pine seeds for the future

A crewmember from the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative cages a whitebark pine cone on a branch tip.

©Colin Wann, NRCC Creative Ascents; used with permission.

The National Park Service (NPS) used $193,750 of Burned Area Rehabilitation (BAR) funds through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to temporarily cage and collect whitebark pinecones in Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.

In May and July 2024, a five-person crew from Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative (NRCC), a subcontractor to American Forests, built 600 cages and donated 350 cages. The cages were placed around cones on whitebark pine branch tips on 110 trees in Yosemite National Park and 80 trees in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, both in remote, high elevation wilderness. Caging immature whitebark pinecones protects them from Clark's Nutcracker predation before the cones are collected at maturity.

During their three weeks of work, crews carried 420 pounds of cages in their backpacks, hiked 520 miles, and climbed 150,000 vertical feet. They caged approximately 4,700 cones, protecting 20-30 cones per tree. An eight-person crew from NRCC plans to return in early October 2024 to collect the mature cones from within these cages and remove the cages.

Caged whitebark pinecones.

©Colin Wann, NRCC Creative Ascents; used with permission.

Once the cones are collected, they will be transported to the US Forest Service’s nursery in Dorena, OR for seed extraction, a portion of which will be put into long-term storage for seed banking and possible use after wildfire. The seeds will be screened for resistance to white pine blister rust and monitored for five years for rust infection and mortality. At the end of these trials, they will identify the proportion of the whitebark pine population that is naturally resistant to blister rust. If resistance rates are high, the population may be able to naturally recover, however, if resistance rates are low, the parks may want to revisit the trees determined to be rust-resistant and collect seed for use in restoration efforts.

The NPS is using $300,000 from BIL funds for the US Forest Service Dorena nursery to extract and store seed, screen trees for blister rust resistance in inoculation trials, and develop genetic markers for needles. Finally, NPS used $51,350 of BIL BAR funding and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funds to hire an American Forests whitebark pine ecologist to coordinate the cone collection effort and create a Southern Sierra whitebark pine conservation strategy.

The next planned phase of the project will involve additional cone collection assisted by an indigenous youth crew, Yosemite Ancestral Stewards, with a goal of collecting cones from at least 600 trees within Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. An additional $255,100 of BIL funds have been requested to complete this cone collection effort and fund the American Forests ecologist for three years.