Berry-stained Science in a Changing Climate

Up the Taku River, a washtub sank under the weight of red jewels, glittering in the sunlight. A family skiff held thousands of ripe nagoonberries and strawberries, evidence of a long day of harvest. Afterwards, in a big pot with heaps of sugar, Dr. Angie Lunda’s mother made jam over a crackling wood fire, pouring the hot, sticky red liquid into jars to savor in the winter cold.

Lunda is a Lingít educator at the University of Alaska Southeast, where she explores how children can build a relationship with the land through harvesting as well as cultural resiliency.

“It was a whole family affair,” said Lunda, who remembers their summer stays fishing and harvesting fondly. “We went every year from the time I was born … I have some pretty vivid memories of seeing the tub fill up with berries and then also the smell of the berries. So sweet and delicious, like pure sweetness in the summer.”

From berry-stained memories of harvest all the way to the kitchen freezer, Alaska berries are vital to our shared ecosystem. According to a study, rural Alaska families harvest on average twenty gallons of this superfood each summer, its flesh full of antioxidants that protect against diseases like dementia, obesity, and heart disease. But berries go deeper, rooted in culture and connection to place and integral in respecting and sharing the land’s gifts.

“It’s collectivist culture at its best, right? It’s not that I’m picking them so I can eat them, but that I’m picking them so that we can all share them. Knowing that some would be given away and some would be eaten by our family,” said Lunda.

Due to a changing climate, communities are now finding their cherished berry patches less bountiful, and in some cases barren. The timing of berry flowering and fruiting is shifting, jeopardizing wildlife and Alaskans’ harvests.

Defrosting, thawing winter

Christa Mulder, a plant ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, researches shifts in berry plant phenology, the timing of when plants flower and produce berries. Phenology is closely intertwined with environmental changes, where differences in snowpack can impact the survival of berry plants through the winter.

Snow cover is essential for numerous berry species in Alaska to protect and insulate these plants through the winter. Snow is made up of intricate crystals with pockets of air in between. These pockets insulate the soil from air outside, keeping delicate buds and shoots safe.

With less snow projected along coastlines like Southeast Alaska, buds formed the previous year are exposed to the winter temperatures, and frost and intense sun can kill buds and leaves, impacting summer berry abundance and harvests.

Mid-winter thaw is another dangerous component and a growing concern in Northern, Western and Interior Alaska, Mulder said.

“If you get a rain-on-snow event in places that you don’t normally get rain-on-snow events, that changes the structure of the snow; it reduces insulation,” Mulder said. “So now suddenly, instead of having a nice, warm, fuzzy blanket, you’ve just got a layer of ice. Imagine that now all that water percolating through the snow freezes again, suddenly there are buds encased in ice.”

Snowmelt is coming earlier and earlier for Alaska communities and ecosystems. Melt is expected to be two to four weeks earlier by 2100 in large parts of the state. In addition, wind storms are changing throughout Alaska, and average wind speeds are projected to increase in the winter, leading to varying amounts of snow, disrupting when and if berries emerge.

More snow has the opposite effect. Predicted for Interior Alaska, this could lead to a slower start to berry season. With the combination of climate change driven differences in snowpack, rain and wind, vital pollinators could be impacted.

“Okay, so that one’s complicated … we don’t know the exact consequences yet,” Mulder said. A lot is unknown about the phenology of pollinators. In theory, as the climate changes rapidly and spring arrives earlier, insects and birds can miss critical windows to pollinate plants that flower early.

Adding to the equation, insects don’t produce their own body heat, so when temperatures drop or it rains, they are not as active. They struggle to fly in heavy rain, which is increasing on average across Alaska, impacting how they reach plants like salmonberries and cloudberries.

But these are potential risks. At present, little is known about when pollinators emerge after the winter. “It’s one of our biggest knowledge gaps in our understanding of pollinators. We don’t know very much about how they overwinter and what triggers them when they come out,” Mulder said.

Mulder’s graduate student Kara Kornhauser has been investigating these knowledge gaps, examining shifts in pollinator activity and flowering. Kornhauser’s new study compares plants that flower early and those that flowered at the average time. They recorded visiting pollinators and how much pollen they deposited.

According to their new study, plants that flowered earlier didn’t get as many visitors. When they flowered later, about five times more pollinators visited. When snow melts earlier, berry plants follow, disrupting and desynchronizing pollination.

Some berries, like crowberries, can be pollinated by wind as well as by insects, making them less vulnerable to mismatches with pollinators. As the climate warms, the season that pollinators are active could lengthen in some parts of the state, where greater rates of pollination could occur in some areas.

Berries rooting, budding

Alaska berries are one of many voices whispering environmental change. Their voices tangle with memories of harvest and are rooted in place. To harvesters in Southeast Alaska, these whispers are loud and mighty. Here, they have been listening to the changes for generations.

“When you are harvesting, you must have an intimate knowledge of the place to know how to harvest efficiently…I think that’s where that value of respect starts to come in,” Lunda said. Five years ago, Lunda remembered a harsh frost that killed all the salmonberries along the coast in Juneau. That year, the only berries she was able to harvest were all the way up the slopes of Eaglecrest Ski Area and Mount Juneau.

Salmonberries, which are unique in their ability to thrive in post-burn environments, are primarily found near these coastal areas. Paired with increased fires, communities in Southcentral and Western Alaska could find salmonberries in future harvests. But in Southeast Alaska’s coast, salmonberries are disappearing.

As winter temperatures become less severe and their growth season lengthens, salmonberry shrubs expand northward and up the mountainside, becoming less accessible.

“They’re no longer in the traditional areas where people have harvested for generations, and what that means is our aunties and naanaas that used to be able to go and harvest can’t now because they’re not able to get there,” says Dr. Wendy K’ah Skáahluwaa Todd, a Xáadas (Haida) scientist — an observer of the world, as her elders call it. Todd is an Associate Professor of Indigenous Science at the University of Alaska Southeast, as well as a mentor at the Sealaska Heritage Institute. She said disappearing berries creates a lasting cultural disconnect.

“We’ve had decades of the environment telling us that we’re hurting it, and it’s changing. But because [berries] don’t have this mainstream impact, but impacted our culture and our traditional cultural ways of using and being on the land, it wasn’t deemed important. It’s always been important, though. Who cares if berries move? We do,” Todd said.

Winterberries: Stories of collaboration

The Winterberry Project is a citizen science project that engages high latitude communities to monitor berry changes. As a part of the project, volunteers, students and UAF scientists monitored overwintering berries, which hold onto their fruit all winter long, critical for animals as well as people.

Overwintering berries are vital for animals in the winter. To prepare for the cold, bears and migrating birds depend on these plants that keep their fruits longer, sometimes through the whole winter. Non-hibernating animals like voles, foxes, and squirrels depend on these berries when other food is scarce.

While doing fieldwork, Mulder and her team have stumbled upon evidence of this relationship everywhere. A collaborator at the project once found a tree hollow packed full to the brim of glistening red cranberries by squirrels — a secret cache for the winter months.

Animals give back to berries in their own way too. Once, Mulder happened upon purple splotches littered along a forest path, flies swarming. To her, it looked like someone took bunches of blueberries and squished them all over the forested trail. She quickly understood it was a fox’s previous meal, scat full of half-digested blueberries spreading precious seeds for the next generation of berry plants.

But animals aren’t the only ones harvesting these berries. Overwintered lowbush cranberries are sometimes gathered in the spring, said to become sweeter and more delicious after the first frost. This berry has the highest level of antioxidants of 16 Interior and Southcentral Alaska berry species.

“We realized there was really no information on when we’re losing the berries. There’s just no data on when plants were dropping their berries. So we thought, well, how could we know if that’s changing if nobody’s tracking it?” Mulder said.

Thousands of children, as well as school groups and volunteers made up their berry task force. They tracked prickly roses, crowberries, highbush and lowbush cranberries. They saw that the plants lost their fruits at a constant rate, instead of all at once. Only a couple of the bushes they studied lost more than 15% of the bushes’ bounty in one week.

Jam sessions, pun intended, happened after the final collection of data. Youth were encouraged to look towards what a better berry future could look like — the best berry future.

“There was a group of kids in Two Rivers, close to Fairbanks, who were concerned about losing things like high bush cranberries,” Mulder said. “So, they decided to plant some other berries, like honeyberries to compensate for that in their schoolyard. The project prompted students to ask questions like, ‘What can we do about it? What can we plant?’”

“We are part of the environment. We are connected to it. What we do in our environment is going to go back to us. If we take care of it, it will take care of us,” Todd said.

Understanding how berries are impacted by a changing climate is complicated and its effects are continuing to shift. Through collaboration with community members and funding from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, Mulder and other berry experts have created berry booklets on five Alaska berries to provide information on these changes and how berries will respond.

Note:

This article was written with the core cultural value of protecting and honoring our land, or Haa Aaní or Ìitl’ Tlagáaa in mind, values laid out by the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

These stories belong to the storytellers. Gunalcheesh and Háw’aa for sharing your experiences and your knowledge.