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Daphne
Trad climber
Mill Valley, CA
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Thanks Ed, really interesting.
Education of the climbing community would be the most effective long-term solution to limiting disturbance in sensitive areas.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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article source
Changes between 1927 and 2004 and effect of rock climbing on occurrence of Saxifraga paniculata and Draba aizoides, two glacial relicts on limestone cliffs of the Swabian Jura, southern Germany
A. Wezel
Journal for Nature Conservation Volume 15, Issue 2, 13 July 2007, Pages 84-93
Summary
A number of glacial relicts can be found on limestone cliffs of the Swabian Jura in southern Germany. In general, they are rare and endangered, particular on cliffs where rock climbing is allowed. Two glacial relicts, Saxifraga paniculata Mill. and Draba aizoides L., were quantitatively surveyed on 28 cliffs in 2004 to investigate their occurrence compared to former surveys and to analyse the effect of rock climbing on species abundance. Number of cushions per cliff and number of rosettes per cushion were counted, smallest and largest diameter of cushions and rosettes, as well as aspect and inclination were also measured. S. paniculata was found on 75% and D. aizoides on 30% of the cliffs. Up to 150 S. paniculata and 370 D. aizoides cushions were noted per cliff, in total there were 696 S. paniculata and 705 D. aizoides cushions. In cliff areas where rock climbing takes place, S. paniculata was only located in relatively uninfluenced parts of the cliffs. In contrast, D. aizoides was found with at a significantly higher frequency on climbed cliffs, and surprisingly, also at the foot of the cliffs, which means that climbing activities even increased numbers of D. aizoides. Rosettes might have been cut of by trampling and climbing and fell to positions where they established new cushions at the base of the cliff. Compared to earlier studies in 1927 and 1966, a higher number of cliffs containing both glacial relicts were found. It can be assumed that not all cliffs had been surveyed in the past and that cliffs were not surveyed as completely as possible. The former locations were confirmed except for one cliff where D. aizoides did not exist anymore. From the cliffs studied, D. aizoides and S. paniculata do not seem to be directly in danger of disappearance in the near future. Nevertheless, rock climbing or visits of hikers on certain cliffs can be a threat, in particular to S. paniculata. This study provides the groundwork for future quantitative monitoring of these two glacial relicts.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I've ordered the book:
Cliff Ecology – Patterns and Processes in Cliff Ecosystems Cambridge Studies in Ecology, ©2005 Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13 978-0521019217 by Douglas W. Larson, Uta Matthes and Peter E. Kelly...
I am also in the process of finding the report (it's at the UCBerkeley bio library):
The Effects of Rock Climbers on the Environment at Pinnacles National Monument, Monterey and San Benito Counties,
C. M. Genetti & P. G. Zenone
California. Technical Report No. 27. Davis, CA: USDI National Park Service, Cooperative Park Studies Unit, University of California at Davis, 1987
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tom Carter
Social climber
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I remember John Hoffman trying to convince others that bolts at the top of some Donner rts actually help limit erosion. Many paths off the top occur when descent rts wander to avoid snow drifts, seasonal streams etc. Those junipers appreciate being left alone.a
Something akin to thatmalso happens with dogs seeking shade - so we have a greater impact than we think.
Thanks everyone.
TC
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 19, 2013 - 10:21pm PT
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in another thread Dingus McGee thought I was babbling on about something I didn't know, and proposed a hypothesis he refers to as "gradient."
That discussion on that thread was probably not a great place to discuss the environmental impact of climbers on cliff ecosystems, so I thought I'd bump this thread back up, which has a lot of references to the literature that I had read at the time.
I don't quite know what Dingus means by "gradients" so he could enlighten us here, more appropriately, as to his hypothesis. There are many interpretations. In one way, he speaks of the time gradient, that the plants "gardened" out of cracks are a more extreme insult to the cliff ecology than the damage that takes place on the faces...
the problem is that we don't actually know what the time gradient is.... for instance, natural environmental variations give rise to massive ecological destruction, think about the last ice age, and the vast domain of plants displaced by ice, say in Yosemite Valley which was filled to half it's current height with ice. What we see, in terms of the ecology, is the result of 12,000 years of natural recovery.
We don't know how quickly cliff ecologies form, when we clean out a crack how long does it take to fill the crack back in? This obviously depends on the specifics of the area, and the rate (a kind of gradient) might be characterized by the experiment done in many climbing areas, albeit inadvertently. For instance, on a relatively popular climb (for the 1960s) that have fallen into obscurity (take the Pohono Pinnacle, North Face) there is a considerable amount of regrowth, so much so that it appears to have been "recovered". It certainly climbs like a Valley FA in the wild parts of the cliff.
That is over a period of less than 50 years, where the past 40 years the climb had passed from the attention of climbers. There are still fixed pins, and other signs of passage.
What we don't know is what was lost, since there was no survey of plants or more generally, of the particular environment. This lack of knowledge pervades all of our thoughts on this matter as we cannot have a real discussion of climber impact without understanding what is being impacted, and what is "natural."
Cliff environments are harsh as rock fall can damage the vegetation naturally. The forces of running water in cracks also displaces rock, soil and plants, and the dynamics of the very environment itself, e.g. exfoliation events in granite cliff landscapes, can have major consequences.
In February of 2011 a large piece of Last Resort Cliff failed and took out the forest down to within about 200 yards of the road... no one noticed, it just looks like the landscape, and the park was closed when it happened so there are no witnesses. The total destruction is far in excess of climber activities on that cliff, and probably throughout the entire park for the history of climbing.
So when assessing climber impacts one has to keep in mind that such large events are not rare occurrences.
How quickly will that system recover? The advance of forests is well documented and has a specific rate... we learn from E.C.Pielou's After the Ice Age; The Return of Life to Glaciated North America that the rate of forestation is of order 100s of meters per year, for lodge pole pine in the west, 200 m per year, on average.
Now the forest gap that is represented by the Last Resort Cliff rock fall does not appear to be a fully mature forest 2 years after the rock fall, but it would be interesting to go back and look, with the eye of an ecologist, and not of a climber, and see what has happened in that time. Most likely, the forest won't look full for another 20 or 30 years, but the "gradient" is averaged over that time, much is happening even immediately after the "destruction" that is not apparent to our eyes.
We might have a fond memory of a particular tree on a particular climb, take the tree atop the 3rd pitch of Nut Cracker that recently died... it happened in a year that seemed to have had a lot of rock fall, lots of similar events over at Reed's Pinnacle area that winter. And while it would be easy to claim that climber's were the cause, it's not at all clear that that fatality wasn't a natural death.
We don't know the dynamics of the cliff ecologies, either, so we don't have a good idea of what the level of our impact is. I'm interested in Dingus' observations at Devil Tower, I am not aware of any scientific study of that cliff ecology but it would be very interesting if there were one.
The lack of knowledge is the very problem, however, with climber impacts. In particular, since we do not know what unique species exist in those settings, we actually cannot assess what we are taking when we put a route up. This is true in cracks and on faces. For the moment, we have not cleaned every surface of every cliff in any of the places we climb (at least I think not, but I do worry about Parkline Cliff). The cliff ecologies act as refuges from human activity in most places, and species that do not compete well in human determined settings might find a place to survive.
But these are not documented. Ecological studies, which are by nature multidisciplinary, are hard enough to conduct on level ground. Add the technical challenges of moving on a cliff, and the special conditions that are unique to the cliff environment (things fall, for instance) and it is not surprising that there are relatively few studies.
While we might actually be right in guessing that our activities do not affect the environment in a significant way, either absolutely or by "gradients", we do not know what, specifically, we have done. The admonishment here is that being mindful is the least we can do when we tread in those places.
I'm sure that Dingus McGee will consider this just so much "babbling," I am happy for him to contribute his wealth of practical knowledge to this topic. He is sure to have many explicit, well thought out examples of the workings of cliff ecologies from his vast experience in those settings over the years. With such input, and the input of others, some of them ecologists, it would be an interesting collaborative adventure piecing together a view of how this all works.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, CA
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Apr 19, 2013 - 11:47pm PT
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Terrific Eddie.
The gorilla in the living room is we do not need yet more routes on even more terrain such as these of which we are speaking, where clearing out large quantities of botanicals is required. We just don't.
We have tens of thousands of routes in The States, all over the place. Probably more even. And all this located in thousands of climbing areas. And to denude yet another cliff or clifflette for the purpose of our climbing, just isn't fair. We now know, these are refuge sites in many cases for ancient botany of all sorts.
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Rocky IV
Social climber
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Apr 20, 2013 - 01:26am PT
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what is a lot more concerning to me than climber cleaning cliffs is agriculture in general. Planting a massive amount of the same species in an area drastically reduces the microbiological diversity. there are plant pathogens that spend most of their life cycle in the atmosphere, if you plant a singe crop in one area that creates a massive influx of one (or two) bacterial species that then goes into the atmosphere and gets carried somewhere else. perhaps we're disrupting the natural cycle of ice nucleating pseudomonas by planting hundreds of acres of one crop. who knows? agriculture could be affecting rain patterns all across the country.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 20, 2013 - 01:28am PT
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human agricultural activities now put as much Nitrogen into the environment at nature does...
but that is another issue. We, as climbers, don't have to trash the very thing we love.
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