Quick Looks
University science highlights from the past year.
Rocky Mountain Forests Burning More Now Than Any Point in Past 2,000 Years
Following 2020’s extreme fire season, high-elevation forests in the central Rocky Mountains now are burning more than at any point in the past 2,000 years, according to a UM study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers from UM and the University of Wyoming analyzed a unique network of fire-history records to understand how 21st-century fire activity compares to wildfires in the past. The findings highlight that burning in recent decades in high-elevation forests of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming is unprecedented over the past several millennia.
As fire paleoecologists — scientists who study historical ecosystems — the team uses charcoal found in lake sediments to piece together the fire history of forests across the Rocky Mountains. The idea, says lead author and UM Professor Philip Higuera, is understanding the past is key to understanding changes we see today and how forests may change in the future.
When 2020’s massive fire season hit, its ferocity startled Higuera and his co-authors — UM doctoral candidate Kyra Wolf and UW Professor Bryan Shuman. Wildfires in Colorado burned through October — unusually late in the year. By November, the 2020 wildfires alone were responsible for 72% of the total area burned in high-elevation forests since 1984 in their study region, and Colorado had seen three of its largest fires on record.
“As the 2020 fire season unfolded, we realized we already had a well-defined understanding of the fire history of many of the places burning, based on over 20 lake-sediment records our teams had collected over the past 15 years,” says Higuera, professor of fire ecology in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation. “When the smoke settled, we thought ‘Wow, we may have witnessed something truly unprecedented here.’ So we combined the existing records for the first time and compared them to recent fire activity. To our surprise, 2020 indeed pushed fire activity outside the range of variability these forests have experienced over at least the past two millennia.”
Study Investigates Why People Pick Certain Campsites
Those in love with the outdoors can spend their entire lives chasing that perfect campsite. New research suggests what they are trying to find.
Will Rice, a UM assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management, used big data to study the 179 extremely popular campsites of Watchman Campground in Utah’s Zion National Park. Campers use an online system to reserve a wide variety of sites with different amenities, and people book the sites an average of 51 to 142 days in advance, providing hard data about demand.
Along with colleague Soyoung Park of Florida Atlantic University, Rice sifted through nearly 23,000 reservations. The researchers found that price and availability of electricity were the largest drivers of demand. Proximity to the adjacent river and ease of access also affected demand. Other factors — such as views of canyon walls or number of nearby neighbors — seemed to have less impact.
The work was published in the Journal of Environmental Management.
“This study demonstrated the power of using the big data of outdoor recreationists’ revealed preferences to build models of decision-making, and did so in a setting that is incredibly relatable to many Americans,” Rice says. “For instance, anyone who has ever picked a campsite within a campground has certainly dealt with the dilemma of proximity to the restroom. I mean, we want to be close enough to make navigation easy in the middle of the night, but not so close that we’re smelling it and listening to the door open and close all night.”
He says past studies on recreation decision-making have relied on surveying people about their stated preferences — basically asking them what they like. This study broke new ground by using revealed preferences — observations of people’s actual decision-making — made possible by the Recreation Information Database. That database contains facts about all bookings made through the federal Recreation.gov site, which makes reservations for many national parks across America.
The researchers studied these site variables at the Watchman Campground: distance to the nearest dump station; distance to the nearest restroom, trash or recycling station, or water spigot; whether it was a walk-in site; price and electricity; number of neighboring campsites within a 40-meter radius; campsite shading; access to the nearby Virgin River; direct access to canyon walls; and views of canyon walls. These variables were broken into three setting categories: managerial, social and ecological.
Certain amenities at sites influenced how early they are reserved, on average. For instance, good views of the canyon walls increase the average booking window by three days. Price, access to electricity and ease of access also increase how early sites are reserved, demonstrating their popularity.
Rice says their work and new research model can help park managers make better decisions about campground design and recreation planning.
Faculty Member Appointed to Prestigious National Health Council
Dr. Andrij Holian, a UM professor of toxicology in the Department Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy, was invited to serve on an influential National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council in 2021.
NAEHSC advises high-level federal government leaders such as the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the director of the National Institutes of Health and the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences on research, training and other matters significant to meet national research goals.
In the announcement on Holian’s invitation to join the council, NIEHS acknowledged the UM professor’s outstanding scholarship, academic accomplishments and experienced leadership in the fields of toxicology, inflammation and the immune response, and signal transduction pathways in tissue injury.
“Being able to contribute to setting research priorities and program balance at NIH is both exciting and daunting,” says Holian of his invitation. “This would not have been possible without the many exciting contributions of outstanding students and staff that I have had the privilege of working with at the UM Center for Environmental Health Sciences over the years.”
Research Reveals How Bacteria Defeat Drugs That Fight Cystic Fibrosis
UM researchers and their partners have discovered a slimy strategy used by bacteria to defeat antibiotics and other drugs used to combat infections afflicting people with cystic fibrosis. The research was published last year in the journal Cell Reports.
Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits a person’s ability to breathe over time. A common strain of bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, often thrives in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, as well as in wounds from burns or diabetic ulcers. Once a P. aeruginosa infection is established, it can be incredibly difficult to cure, despite repeated courses of antibiotics.
Dr. Laura Jennings, a research assistant professor in UM’s Division of Biological Sciences and an affiliate with the University’s Center for Translational Medicine, says their research showed that the stubborn germs living in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients create a self-produced carbohydrate slime. And this slime makes the bacteria more resistant to the antibiotics prescribed by doctors, as well as drugs that reduce the thickness of mucus.
“We found the first direct evidence that these carbohydrates are produced at the sites of infection,” Jennings says. “We showed that one of the carbohydrates, called Pel, sticks to extracellular DNA, which is abundant in the thick mucus secretions prominent in cystic fibrosis lungs.
“This interaction makes a slimy protective layer around the bacteria, making them harder to kill,” she says. “As such, it reduces the pathogen’s susceptibility to antibiotics and drugs aimed at reducing the thickness of airway mucus by digesting DNA.”
Glacier Retreat May Produce New Salmon Habitat
For decades, climate change has had detrimental impacts on Pacific salmon populations. Spawning streams are overheating, and droughts are drying up salmon habitats entirely, impacting many food webs from the Rocky Mountains and Coast Ranges to the Pacific Ocean.
But in a new study involving researchers at the UM Flathead Lake Biological Station, scientists discovered warming trends may offer one silver lining, if only for a while: The retreat of glaciers in the Pacific mountains of western North America potentially could produce more than 6,000 kilometers of new Pacific salmon habitat by the year 2100.
“Climate change alters the shape and dynamics of stream ecosystems,” says Diane Whited, an FLBS scientist whose role in the study focused on spatial modeling of potentially accessible stream habitat once glaciers have receded. “This information is crucial for managing the future of salmon habitat and productivity.”
The work was led by Simon Fraser University and published in Nature Communications.
Under a moderate climate scenario, the loss or reduction of those glaciers may reveal around 6,150 kilometers of potential new salmon habitat throughout the Pacific mountains of western North America by the year 2100 — a distance nearly equal to the length of the Mississippi River.
Research Reveals Ancient People Had More Diverse Gut Microorganisms
Only an anthropologist would treasure millennia-old human feces found in dry caves.
Just ask Dr. Meradeth Snow, a researcher and co-chair of the UM Department of Anthropology. She is part of an international team, led by the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center, that used human “paleofeces” to discover that ancient people had far different microorganisms living in their guts than we do in modern times.
Snow says studying the gut microbes found in the ancient fecal material may offer clues to combat diseases like diabetes that afflict people living in today’s industrialized societies.
“We need to have some specific microorganisms in the right ratios for our bodies to operate effectively,” Snow says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship. But when we study people today — anywhere on the planet — we know that their gut microbiomes have been influenced by our modern world, either through diet, chemicals, antibiotics or a host of other things. So understanding what the gut microbiome looked like before industrialization happened helps us understand what’s different in today’s guts.”
This new research was in Nature last year. Snow and UM graduate student Tre Blohm were among the 28 authors of the piece from around the globe.
Snow says the feces they studied came from dry caves in Utah and northern Mexico. So what does the 1,000-year-old human excrement look like?
“The caves these paleofeces came from are known for their amazing preservation,” she says. “Things that would normally degrade over time look almost brand new. So the paleofeces looked like, well, feces that are very dried out.”
Snow and Blohm worked hands-on with the precious specimens, suiting up in a clean-room laboratory at UM to avoid contamination from the environment or any other microorganisms — not an easy task when the tiny creatures are literally in and on everything. They would carefully collect a small portion that allowed them to separate out the DNA from the rest of the material. Blohm then used the sequenced DNA to confirm the paleofeces came from ancient people.
The senior author of the Nature paper is Aleksandar Kostic of the Joslin Diabetes Center. In previous studies, he found modern industrial diets may lead to less-diverse gut biomes and diabetes, and he wanted ancient human gut DNA to compare with modern samples. Almost 40% of microbial species in the ancient samples had never been seen before.
More Quick Looks …
Cornerstone UM humanities programs received a windfall $499,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The funding comes from the federal government’s American Rescue Plan, which awards funding for national programming in the humanities that “are an essential component of economic and civic life in the United States.” The grant, “Making the Humanities Public: Racial Justice, Death in a Time of COVID and Sustaining Native Scholarship,” will be led by Dr. Tobin Miller Shearer, UM professor of history, African-American studies and the Humanities Institute.
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UM researcher Angela Luis was awarded a $2.5 million NSF grant to study how diversity of competitor species affects infectious disease transmission in wildlife — specifically hantavirus in deer mice. The associate professor of population and disease ecology will use the grant to learn more about how to predict increases in hantavirus in rodents, and, ideally, help prevent its spread to humans.
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UM’s startup incubator MonTEC earned an $850,000 grant from Google.org to support Indigenous women looking to start or grow a business in Montana. MonTEC will use the funds in collaboration with Salish Kootenai College and Blackfeet Community College to develop online programming in a variety of subjects to support new and existing female-owned businesses. “We will use this generous grant from Google to support and supplement the existing strength of Indigenous women by providing them with culturally empowering online courses,” said Morgan Slemberger, UM director of Women’s Entrepreneurship & Leadership.
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UM’s spectrUM Discovery Area has received a $250,000 Museums for America project grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It will fund a three-year project, allowing spectrUM and tribal partners from across Montana to develop inclusive museum experiences that engage visitors with Indigenous science and culture. Led by spectrUM Director Jessie Herbert-Meny, the project will deepen and explore cross-cultural approaches to science education while embedding Indigenous science and ways of knowing throughout spectrUM’s new museum location at the Missoula Public Library.
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UM geosciences Assistant Professor Hilary Martens has received a prestigious grant from NASA’s Earth Surface and Interior Division. She will use the $443,000 award to examine the relationship between the ocean tides and changes in the shape of the Earth. The project will use GPS to measure how the Earth flexes and deforms under the shifting weight of ocean water. •
