#89: Burning Questions: Understanding Fire Management with Lenya Quinn-Davidson

Have you ever seen a fuzzy looking ant? Maybe it looked like a little pipe cleaner with fuzzy red or yellow hair?

If so, you probably saw a velvet ant. And here’s the thing - it’s not even an ant at all. They’re wingless wasps, and they often turn up along hiking trails, roadsides, and sometimes even in your backyard! And if you haven’t seen one, hit pause and check out the show notes on naturesarchive.com for a few photos.

What’s more, these wasps have quite the reputation and an amazing natural history.

With me today is Dr. Joseph Wilson, an evolutionary ecologist and associate professor of biology at Utah State University. Dr. Wilson is also the co-author of the new book, Velvet Ants of North America, as well as the wildly popular The Bees in Your Backyard.

I reached out to Dr. Wilson because I’ve always been fascinated with velvet ants, but found precious little information about them. I purchased the book and reached out to Dr. Wilson, and he graciously agreed to share some of his knowledge.

For example, did you know that some velvet ants have an auditory warning? And half of velvet ants are nocturnal? We discuss why we seem to usually see velvet ants deterministically wandering near trails, why they are often - and inaccurately - called cow killers, and more.

But I couldn’t have a chat with Dr. Wilson and not talk bees, so we kick things off with some discussion of bees, buzz pollination and more before transitioning to velvet ants.

Find Dr. Wilson on The Bees in Your Backyard, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

FULL SHOW NOTES

MORE LINKS
Also check out our interview with Krystle Hickman (episode #66) - about finding and photographing native bees.

The Bees in Your Backyard by Olivia Messinger Carril and Joseph Wilson
Common Bees of Western North America
Common Bees of Eastern North America
Velvet Ants of North America by Williams, Pan, and Wilson

Note: books are affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Support independent bookstores AND Jumpstart Nature by purchasing through these links or our bookshop store.

Other Insect-oriented Podcasts

Just Bugs
Bug Banter
Bugs Need Heroes

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

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In nature, tree physiology is like the engine that keeps forests running smoothly, similar to how human physiology keeps our bodies going. Just as we study how our bodies' metabolism, respiratory systems, and other systems work to keep us healthy, biologists can look at tree physiology to understand how trees grow, use energy, and cope with challenges in their environment.

Today’s guest, Dr. Lucy Kerhoulas, is an Associate Professor of Forest Ecophysiology at Cal-Poly Humboldt. She specializes in the forest physiology of northwestern California, which includes redwoods, Douglas fir, oaks, and more.

Today Dr. Kerhoulas explores various aspects of forest physiology including how they  adapt to different conditions such as fire and drought. She delves into the scientific tools used to study how trees respond to environmental changes, including measuring carbon isotopes in tree tissues to assess impacts of drought. And this understanding of carbon isotope preferences provides interesting insights into historical atmospheric carbon levels, dating back hundreds of years. In fact, this is sometimes called “the smoking gun”, because it provides strong evidence of fossil fuel contributions to atmospheric carbon.

Dr. Kerhoulas also discusses how trees can share resources and signal each other during times of stress, possibly creating a cooperative environment within a forest.

This was a jam-packed discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Links to Topics Mentioned
Bigfoot Trail Alliance
CDFW
CNPS
CZU Complex Fire Map
Kerhoulas Forest Physiology Lab
Michael Kauffmann in Nature’s Archive Episode #41 discusses conifer trees and the Klamath Mountains 

Thanks to Kat Hill for editing help in today's episode.
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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

You’re in for a treat today - it’s like two episodes in one.

My guest today is Allasandra Valdez, a botanist working on her PhD in plant physiology in  Cornell University’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department. Allasandra also has a background studying invasive species, and is the creator and host of The Happy Botanist podcast.

Today’s wide-ranging discussion touches on everything from studying plants' response to climate change through looking at carbon 13 isotopes, to invasive species including the Hemlock wooly adelgid, to the surprising behaviors of an invasive grass called Johnson Grass.

We also discuss Allasandra’s work in science communication and her podcast, The Happy Botanist.

As you know, my Jumpstart Nature organization seeks to amplify great work being done by others, and after meeting Allasandra and learning about her work and her vision, I felt that she fit the bill. So the last 30 minutes or so of today’s episode is a re-share of one of her episodes with Dr. Dan Katz. Dr. Katz studies airborne pollen - specifically allergenic pollen. If you’ve ever wondered why some pollen causes so much havoc, or if those pollen forecasts you sometimes see on the local weather are accurate, stay tuned to learn more.

Find Allasandra on Instagram and TikTok, and her podcast is on all of the usual podcast services, and the web at The Happy Botanist podcast.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Links
Daniel Katz: https://www.thekatzlab.com/

The Happy Botanist podcast

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

Many of you might recall the dramatic 2020 fire season in the western USA. In California alone, close to 4 million acres burned. Cities were clouded with smoke and unhealthy air for many weeks. I had ash fall at my home in San Jose, CA on several occasions.

But did you know that based on pre-colonial historical estimates, 4 million acres burned would be considered “below average”. How can that be? Does that mean that every summer in the 1700’s had smoke filled air and devastating fires? Spoiler alert: the answer is no.

In today’s episode, we reconcile how it was possible for more acres of land to burn every year, but with less dramatic impact. In fact, that historical fire was largely beneficial to the land.

Our guest today, who helps us decipher historical fire and how we can add more beneficial fire back to the landscape is Lenya Quinn-Davidson.

And when you have a guest who’s first name literally means “firewood” in Spanish (alternative spelling), you know you’ve found the right person to discuss wildfire management.

But Lenya Quinn-Davidson’s qualifications extend well beyond her name. She’s the Director of the FIRE network for the University of California’s Agriculture and Natural Resources organization. She focuses on the various ways humans connect with fire, including the use of prescribed fire for habitat restoration, invasive species control, and ecosystem and community resiliency. She’s actively engaged in local and national prescribed fire communities, and is an advocate for increasing diversity in the world of wildfire.

A quick aside before we get into the interview. Obviously, climate change is a huge component for why we see bigger fires. Heat has a disproportionate impact on fire intensity. So while we don’t talk about climate change much today, it is absolutely an amplifying factor in wildfire intensity and frequency.

You can find Lenya at LenyaQD on twitter.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Links
California Prescribed Burn Associations
Dixie Fire
Scott Stephens  - wildfire reconstructions from UC Berkeley
UCANR Fire Advisors
WTREX - Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges

Thanks to Kat Hill for editing help in this episode.

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

I bet you’ve heard of the National Park Service. Or the US Forest Service which manages all of our National Forests.

But did you know that there is another land management agency that manages more public land than either the National Parks or National Forests? This overlooked agency is the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM.

Josh Jackson has become one of the BLM’s top enthusiasts, with a huge following on his forgottenlandscalifornia instagram. He’s also a writer and conservationist, and is working on a new book all about BLM lands.

Today we dig into what turned Josh on to these fascinating places. He gives us a nice overview of what they’re like, the amazing sites and plants and animals you may see, and how you can enjoy them too. 

We also learn about his upcoming book, to be published with Heyday Books. It sounds intriguing , and aims to fill a major gap in the literature. You can find volumes about national and state parks and national forests - but try to find similar literature on BLM lands. Good luck on that!

I strongly suggest you follow Josh on his forgottenlandscalifornia instagram to see and hear about some of these amazing places.

FULL SHOW NOTES

LINKS
People and Organizations

Baba Dioum
Bureau of Land Management's visitors website
Heyday Books
Obi Kaufmann

Books and Other Things
California Desert Plants, by Kauffmann, Rundel, and Gustafson
Federal Land Policy and Management Act
In Defense of Public Lands, by Steven Davis
Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
These American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands, by Zaslowsky and Watkins
The Trouble With Wilderness - William Cronon's essay
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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

Today’s episode is all about California Condors with Tiana Williams-Claussen, the director of the Yurok Tribe’s wildlife department. This episode is actually from my friend Michelle Fullner of the Golden State Naturalist podcast. If you don’t know Golden State Naturalist, I think this episode is pretty indicative of Michelle’s work. She travels around California to meet and interview interesting people in the field. There is a definite advantage to in-person interviews, and I wish I could do more.

Even though this episode is about California Condors, and the podcast is California-centric, today’s episode is still broadly applicable. California Condors historically lived in a large chunk of the western North America, from southern Canada to northern Mexico. And the challenges facing Condors, and the efforts to reintroduce and sustain them have many parallels.

Now, I don’t want to take away from Michelle’s introduction for this episode coming shortly. But I do want to tell you why I wanted to cover Condors on Nature’s Archive.

Right off the bat, condors are huge - boasting a 9 foot wingspan. They’re also critically endangered, which is why Tiana Williams-Claussen is such a great guest - she’s leading a reintroduction program with the Yurok Tribe in northern California.

As long time listeners know, I particularly enjoy covering overlooked and misrepresented flora and fauna. And for today, I’m going to lump condors and vultures together. In fact, in North America, vultures and condors are in the same family of birds, and occupy similar ecological roles.

And what role is that? Well, the textbooks say “scavengers”. And if you are like most people, you might have an unconscious negative bias towards scavengers. Why? So much of our human-centric perspective is based on how we live, and casts a negative light towards other evolved lifestyles, such as parasitism, or in this case, scavenging.

To scavenge - that is, eat already dead animals - one must have some pretty amazing adaptations. Afterall, the moment an animal dies, bacteria starts to take over. And the fact the animal died in the first place might indicate that it was already diseased, especially if it didn’t die as roadkill.

If a diseased carcass remains on the landscape for an extended period of time, it can become a disease vector. But vultures and condors are special. Their acidic stomachs and unique immune systems help protect them.

I heard a great reframing of the role condors and vultures play - instead of scavengers, they are nature’s immune system. By rapidly clearing dead animals, they prevent and halt disease spread. And there are examples around the world where vultures had died off for various, usually human-caused reasons, and this resulted in significant increases in diseases in other animals - including rabies.

FULL SHOW NOTES

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

Double the nature content in the same amount of time as a typical Nature's Archive? Well, I think we've come close today, and no, we're not playing an interview at double speed.

Here's your chance to hear two episodes of the Jumpstart Nature podcast from our pilot season, covering the topics of treating your yard like a habitat  (The Yard of the Future Full Show Notes), and how shifting baseline syndrome affects our perception of the health of the environment (We Live in a 10% World Full Show Notes).

You might recognize bits and pieces of these episodes, because I aired a couple of the interviews in their entirety on Nature's Archive. But there is lots of new content that hasn't aired here.

I hope you enjoy this format! Jumpstart Nature brings multiple perspectives to topics we cover, and ties it together with an entertaining and inspiring narrative from Griff Griffith.

Let me know what you think! And if you like it, please subscribe to Jumpstart Nature on your favorite podcast app.

Guests in this double feature include Dr. Doug Tallamy, Mary Phillips, Leslie Inman, Dr. Loren McClenachan, Dr. Alison Whipple, Ben Goldfarb, and Francisco Saavedra Jr.

And regular Nature's Archive interview podcasts will be back in two weeks!

Links
The Yard of the Future Full Show Notes
We Live in a 10% World Full Show Notes

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

Let’s dive into the enchanting world of hidden wonders that come to life after dark!

Our guests today are Charles Hood and José Martínez-Fonseca, authors of the new book “Nocturnalia: Nighttime Life of the Western USA" from Heyday Books.

Charles is an author, poet, birder, and world traveler, and as you’ll hear, an exceptional naturalist, too. Jose has a PhD in Bat Ecology, and as a result, has extensive experienced studying animals of the night.

Today we uncover the intriguing behaviors of nocturnal creatures such as nectar-feeding bats and vampire bats, scorpions that glow under UV light, and the often ignored but fascinating small owls - we’re talking owls the size of a American Robin - or even smaller! Observe how even the familiar environment of urban backyards transform into arenas of ecological discovery when the sun goes down.

Tailored for nature enthusiasts and curious minds alike, this conversation is a gateway to a world less explored - the intriguing and overlooked world of nocturnal nature.

FULL SHOW NOTES (with photos!)

LINKS
A Salad Only The Devil Would Eat, by Charles Hood
Charles Hood's Website
Jose Martinez-Fonseca on Instagram, and his photography website
Nature's Archive episode about Bats with Dr. Dave Johnston

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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

Weather is like your mood, and climate is like your personality. Those are the words of today’s guest, Dr. Marshall Shepherd (Twitter,  Facebook and Instagram).

Despite the clear differences between these two concepts, there are many topics of confusion that persist. For example, is El Nino, which we discussed a few weeks ago on this podcast, a climate condition or a weather condition? And how can forecasters be confident in their long term climate predictions when it is so hard to predict weather 10 days out?

Dr. Shepherd is just the person to help us understand these concepts. He is the Director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia. He’s also host of the Weather Channel series Weather Geeks, previously a research meteorologist for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and has had multiple popular TED talks.

Today we talk about climate and weather and how they are predicted. We discuss the computer models used for both, how they differ, how they've improved, and  where they still need improvement.

He also shares some of his research on how urban areas affect and change weather, and several other fascinating topics.

This episode might sound different than a typical Nature’s Archive interview. That’s because we were planning to use this conversation in an upcoming Jumpstart Nature podcast. So, you might hear a few terms and concepts mentioned without explanation - but stick with it, because we end up defining everything later.

Check these past episodes for more information on topics discussed today: episode #80 on oceans and El Nino and episode #62 on snowflake and precipitation genesis

FULL SHOW NOTES

Dr. Shepherd's Publications
Ed Lorenz and Chaos Theory
Example Forecast Discussion available from the National Weather Service
Hurricane Otis
Six America’s Study
TED Talks: 3 kinds of bias that shape your worldview (2018); Slaying the "zombies" of climate science (2013)
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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats! 

There are living trees in the United States that are approaching 5000 years old - and I’m not talking about trees that clone (I’m looking at you, aspen). Imagine if those trees could talk! Well, in a way, they can!

That’s where dendrochronologists like Dr. Grant Harley come in.

And it turns out that the science of dendrochronology is so much more far reaching than I ever imagined. Dr. Harley tells us how he reads the trees, inferring things like climate patterns, wildfire history, and community ecology. But this unique science even allows for dating artifacts, such as coffins, cabins, shipwrecks, and other wooden objects.

We cover all of this and more, including how tree rings are assessed without killing the tree.  And how technology is used to make these assessments. Dr. Harley also answers why trees in the western US make better specimens for assessing historical climate. And just what is the medieval climate anomaly and why is it important to us today?

I feel like Dr. Harley could make a series of podcasts out of dendrochronology, the history it tells us, and the mysteries it helps us solve. Find Dr. Harley on Twitter @dendrotrog.

FULL SHOW NOTES

Links To Topics Discussed

Note: links to books are affiliate links

Fundamentals of Tree Ring Research by James Speer

The Fellowship of the Tree Rings RadioLab episode that Dr. Harley appeared on

North American Dendroecological Fieldweek

Thanks for Michelle Balderston for editing help this week
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Get inspired with the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature podcast we all need.

Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests such as Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown. And topics ranging from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats!