Bob Parmenter Oral History Interview, July 29, 2015

SAMUEL SCHMIEDING: Good day, this is Dr. Samuel Schmieding, Oregon State University, College of Forestry. I am here on July 29, 2015 with Bob Parmenter. How would you call your specialty, Bob? Tell me how you would like to be represented in the interview.

BOB PARMENTER: Sure, I'm an ecologist, currently with the Valles Caldera National Preserve and soon to be with the National Park Service. I'm the Director of the Scientific Services Division with the Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico.

SS: Bob has also had a long relationship with research at Mount St. Helens post 1980 eruption and this is part of the Mount St. Helens Oral History Project. We will be talking with Bob basically about his work and experience and relationship with the mountain and also with the science and the people who have done that. I want to thank you for being willing to do this, Bob.

BP: It is my pleasure.

SS: We will start away. When did you first become interested in biology, ecology, and biological, ecological processes?

BP: Oh, when I was a kid growing up in Virginia, northern Virginia. There was a creek and a swamp and old-growth forest just down from my house two blocks away by the baseball diamond. I'd be in the woods, in the creek all the time catching frogs and salamanders and turtles and snakes and fish and small mammals and everything. Had a long series of pets in the house. My mom had been born and raised up until age 12 in Africa in the Belgian Congo as a daughter of missionaries over there. She had a lot of pets when she was little, so she was very tolerant of me bringing these animals back into the house. I just grew up 00:02:00with all kinds of wild animals in Virginia and it just kind of stuck. I decided to be a biologist early on in high school and was a biology major the first day of college and went on to graduate school and you can actually be paid to be a biologist. It's a good career.

SS: Just real quick-where did you go to school? Where did you get your degrees? Who did you study under? Anybody notable?

BP: My undergraduate degree was in biology as a Bachelor of Arts at Colorado College and main people there, the faculty was pretty small. There were 8 or 10 faculty members, but Dick Beidleman, who is a professor there (he passed away a couple of years ago); Jim Enderson and Ron Hathaway and all these guys are ecologists and parasitologists and Jack Carter, a botanist, so they were very influential in getting me out in the Rocky Mountains to learn about these 00:03:00things. I went down to the University of Georgia for a master's degree at Savannah River Ecology Lab where my major professor was Whit Gibbons, the famous herpetologist. I was working on freshwater turtles, but I also had the privilege of having Gene Odum on my committee along with Becky Sharitz, who's a famous botanist.

SS: So, you studied with one of the famous Odum brothers, right?

BP: That's right. That's right. I was Gene's tennis doubles partner for 2 years. I got to hang around Gene Odum quite a lot. And Ed Farnsworth, an entomologist who hired me as a research assistant, so I worked with Ed quite a bit. Then I decided at that point I wanted to learn more about desert ecosystems, so the International Biological Program, the IBP, was raging, just wrapping up, actually, in the mid-1970s. The headquarters for the Desert IBP in North America 00:04:00was in Utah State, in Logan, with Fred Wagner and Jim MacMahon and folks of that group. I figured if I'm going to study desert biology, might as well go to the best desert school around: Utah State Biology Program. I went there and did a Ph.D. in biology and ecology and we were working mostly (again, I was a student of Jim MacMahon's who became instrumental in the Mount St. Helens story here) and we were working in western Wyoming on a big project funded by NSF on successional processes and how to strategically accelerate succession in disturbed landscapes. The disturbance we selected was surface coal mining. This is going to, believe it or not, lead to Mount St. Helens. In 1979, 1980 we're just getting this program going on a big surface coal mine operated by Chevron Corporation, in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and they're blasting these massive rock walls 00:05:00and coal to remove the overburden so they could extract the coal. It was just massive rubble fields and what not. We were looking at ways to accelerate reclamation up here, to make it more efficient and faster and better to get the ecosystem back together again. This is high elevation, cold desert environment, shrub steppe systems. That's what I did my dissertation on and then stayed on for a few years afterwards as an assistant professor.

SS: At Utah State?

BP: At Utah State, right. I kept writing myself into grants while I was there with Jim. On May 18th, that Sunday afternoon, I'm over at MacMahon's house. We're having pizzas and beers with a couple of the other graduate students, a typical Sunday afternoon in Logan, we're watching the news about Mount St. Helens erupting that morning. There's a helicopter view of the terrain that's 00:06:00just, this essay of white and gray and black and all this stuff and every now and then we're thinking is this in black and white? Is there something wrong with the TV? But every now and then you'd see a flash of bright yellow in the corner and that was the flight suit of the helicopter pilot. You realize that this landscape is in color and that's what it looks like. We looked at each other and we said, "That looks like Kemmerer, Wyoming! Looks like the coal mine!" Just piles of rubble and rock and primary succession. We immediately thought we ought to get in touch with our colleagues out in the Northwest and see if we can apply our primary successional studies to the volcano.

SS: Now I take it that Jim MacMahon was connected with the Andrews people and Jerry Franklin and people like that?

BP: Oh yeah, they'd been long-term buddies.

SS: Because they were IBP people throughout, right?

BP: That's right. That's right. So, Jim knew Jerry Franklin and Fred Swanson and 00:07:00all those guys really well. The upshot was that he got in touch with them right away and spent parts of that first summer in 1980 out here, but I was busy with my dissertation work in Wyoming. I didn't get up here in '80 or '81. But, I finished in the spring of '82. At that point we had some NSF money to do some preliminary assessments up here in a gopher project to determine the impact of pocket gophers on islands of fertility and successional processes. We had an undergraduate, well, a guy who had just finished his bachelors degree named Charles Crisafulli, who was hired on the project manager, the head technician, essentially.

SS: Here?

BP: Yeah. For the Mount St. Helens project. But he worked at Utah State.

SS: Oh, so Charlie came from Utah State?

BP: He was an Aggie.

SS: Okay, now I see the connection.

BP: That's it. So, he was in our lab and he had helped us in Kemmerer, Wyoming and so he was a real good field biologist. He had already demonstrated his skills in that regard. Jim hired him as the lead project manager for this grant up in St. Helens. In 1982, we were amassing all the people. I was a post-doc with Jim at that time for a year. We just got everybody together and came up here to help install gopher plots. There were trenched fences that try to keep gophers or keep gophers out, depending on the treatment and so we worked up here for it must have been 3 or 4 weeks that summer and then we went back to working in Wyoming or what not. But that got the bug in me. I came up every year since then and in 1983 we had, that is when Roger del Moral and Larry Bliss, plant 00:09:00physiologists from University of Washington, had gotten an NSF grant for studying plant succession on the volcano for 4 years and NSF had come back and said this is a great project. We're going to fund it, but where are the animals? You guys don't have any animals in here. They ended up calling MacMahon to write an addendum to that grant, and MacMahon, of course, handed that to me, because I was the zoologist here. MacMahon was as well. But I ended up writing this thing and it got funded for 4 years. That funded Charlie for another 4 years, and we got continuous measurements through the early years after the eruption.

SS: Charlie eventually became Forest Service, right?

BP: That's right. The funding ran out in 1987. So, he was hooked up here and so he started getting jobs, I think they were, it wasn't full-time permanent, but 00:10:00it turned into that up here by the early '90s. He became the biologist of the Pacific Northwest Research Station and has been here ever since.

SS: Basically, assigned to Mount St. Helens.

BP: That's right. That's right. He's been kind of a one-man show in terms of PNW staffing up here. He's done just an incredible job of keeping the science programs going.

SS: He's committed his whole career to this.

BP: Oh, yes, absolutely.

SS: It's amazing.

BP: What a great legacy, too. That's something you can really be proud of. We were actually calculating, I think it was last year, the total number of publications that had come off the volcano, and, basically, that he had helped coordinate, he didn't author every one of them, but just the coordination and the logistics and the permits and technicians where we needed them, and it was some astounding rate of publication once every 14 days for 30 years. For 30 00:11:00years! Then you add on all the PBS specials [Public Broadcasting] and the NOVA specials and all the translation of that information into the public realm of knowledge, so that it actually is not just any science articles, it's on TV where the lay person can actually learn about what we've found. Charlie's done a spectacular job. That's how I got up here in the early 1980s.

SS: Going back, I want to just talk about what were your conceptions, either as a youth or as a young professional before St. Helens about how you thought volcanos were supposed to look and act like?

BP: I was, volcanos were just you know they were just mountains that blew up now and then. They would erupt. They wouldn't actually explode. They would just shoot large columns of smoke and ash in the air and that stuff would come down 00:12:00somewhere or just get into the atmosphere and become entrained and blow around. I hadn't given it much thought at all. Mount St. Helens was clearly it had a lot of things going for it: the science and technology were good at that point. It was in an age where remote sensing was just kicking in. There were a lot of good techniques. There was an understanding from the IBP at that time of linking projects together, so botany with entomology with mammalogy and ornithology and soils and nutrient science and all this. It occurred at just the right time intellectually for North American scientists, but it was also in North America. It was in the United States. That meant it was a home-grown thing. The problems created by the eruption and the post-eruption flooding and what not, those were 00:13:00hitting American citizens, so the U.S. Government and the National Science Foundation was really interested. The USGS was very interested. The Forest Service was very interested in this. It was in the right place and the right time with the right quality of people in universities and government agencies that were able to respond to this. We talk about the serendipitous nature of the actual eruption having occurred while there was still snowpack and occurred during the day versus at night and it was on a clear sunny day, so we got photos of it and there's all of these things that just happen to coalesce at the same time and place that allowed us to really understand what was going on here.

SS: What was the first time you visited and saw this place? Describe your first 00:14:00encounter with the actual, physical place in the mountain in the post eruption.

BP: Well, my time up here again in summer of '82 was driving up the 99 road. It was a one-lane gravel road with turnouts with trash can lids nailed to trees and little signs saying CB Channel 9 used on this road. You were supposed to call in about the logging trucks every mile. We're just going up through this forest that you could still see a lot of the tephra was lying on the ground and this white dust hung in the air as the vehicle goes by. We come across a bare meadow and you can't really see much of anything. You can see the volcano in the distance. But we get down to where you enter the scorch zone, where we stopped on our field trip on Monday, and you turn that corner and there it was. You just 00:15:00go, holy smokes. That was the vista.

SS: Of course [SS talks over BP].

BP: You just go, wow!

SS: Back then there was much less successional processes.

BP: Oh yeah.

SS: So, a lot less green than you see today.

BP: Oh yeah. Almost no green at all. It was a landscape in grays, shades of grays. It was really stunning at that point. Then when you started to pay attention to the little things. You'd see a patch of lupine or fireweed was popped up here or there and you could look across the landscape and see a big green square which had been a clear-cut prior to the blast. It was already colonized by grasses and shrubs whose meristematic buds are below ground, and, so, when that blast came across it kind of mowed off the above-ground stuff, but the plants were still alive.

SS: In other words, except for the very center of the pyroclastic flow, which 00:16:00incinerated everything, all these other processes were allowed to come up.

BP: That's right. Secondary succession in some places got a quick jump on it. It was just no big deal. The plants where already established and they just like somebody took a lawnmower to them and they just pop right back up the next spring. But, yeah, it was a very impressive view. It was really staggering to see landscape that large had been impacted so severely. Then of course as we're driving into some of our study sites you get into the blowdown zone after the scorch zone and you just see these massive trees for miles and miles, as far as you can see. It's just laid flat.

SS: Now your role, you and/or your team that you were a part of, what was your goal that you came in there, or what was your perceived goal? Once you got there 00:17:00and you actually saw what was there, how did you develop your methodology and decide what you guys wanted to do and how to do it?

BP: Well, the benefits we already knew. We had the trapping. We were there to do small mammal work. Charlie was going to be doing bird work. We were going to start off with some insect trapping as well. For the insects we were going to do ground dwelling arthropods, because there was no vegetation. You're kind of one-dimensional component. It was just the size of the area, and, so, we quickly realized that you couldn't, normally you would have a lot of funding and a lot of crews and you'd have replicated sites across the landscape. Well, we didn't have time. We didn't have the money. We didn't have the staff. So, we had to pick representative sites and so what we tried to do is match elevations, 00:18:00aspect, the pre-eruption flora. When we're looking for old-growth forests, we're looking for noble fir or Douglas fir, hemlock, that sort of thing, and try to balance it so these sites were pretty similar ahead of time before the eruption and then we would follow each one based on its level of disturbance and start to follow it through time.

SS: Now the sites we visited this morning, when were these set up?

BP: Those were set up in 1981, I believe.

SS: Actually, before you got here, then?

BP: Right, before I was here. Those were up and running. A graduate student named Kurt Johnson was doing some of the trapping on those places for his dissertation work. MacMahon and Kurt and Charlie had picked out a number of 00:19:00these sites already. Then, of course, some of them were eventually logged or they were salvaged logged or something, so we had to move them and find new sites that were quite similar and what not. They've done a pretty good job of trying to keep things matched up here.

SS: What do you remember about those first couple of years in terms of getting access? Permits? I mean the process of going in and doing, that logistics of it?

BP: The logistics were easy on the paperwork side. The Forest Service was very happy to have us work up here. We had some plots over on Weyerhaeuser land and they were fine with us coming in there as well. It's one of these things, we didn't cost of them anything and we weren't doing any damage and they could get some information. That part was fine. The travel logistics was what was the problem is that the roads were in terrible condition.

SS: Or non-existent.

BP: Or non-existent. Yeah, they were buried. Or the areas that were accessible were being salvaged logged. There was a constant flow of trucks, empties going in and full ones coming out, for the loggers that were actually quite dangerous. There were a couple of researchers we heard about (we didn't know any) but had been killed or injured in wrecks with logging trucks and we had a few of our own close calls coming up those roads.

SS: Wasn't Roger del Moral talking about that the other day?

BP: Yeah, and we had similar things where you'd be driving up the road and calling on the CB radio. They had painted mile markers on pieces of tin or on the trees themselves as you're going up, so you were supposed to call on the CB, 00:21:00"Utah State suburban coming up the 99-road mile marker 3" and the logger's coming out, they'd come back and say "we're coming down loaded mile marker 4." You'd know you had about another minute to drive up and then you'd start looking for a place to pull over and wait until they'd come by. We had a few of those where it was, usually you could tell by the amount of static on the CB of how far away the trucks were. We had one, just like Roger's incident, where we're coming up and we said, "We're at mile marker 12" and immediately the call comes back from a logger says, "What mile marker did you say?" And it was crystal clear on the radio. No static at all.

SS: Close.

BP: That's right. We said 12 and he says, "Look out!" So, we immediately pulled over and 2 seconds later he comes roaring around the corner.

SS: How fast were these guys driving?

BP: Oh, it seemed really fast, but in reality, you can't drive very fast. Those roads are so curvy you'd go right off the edge. But a normal speed limit for those roads would be 25 or 30. Coming down loaded, if they're on a straight away they might hit 35 or 40. But, they'd have to downshift for the corners. But it was just the momentum, just squash you like a bug if you were in front of those things.

SS: What was your emotional reaction to seeing this in the early days? The first time, maybe first couple of years when it was still pretty fresh?

BP: Yeah, pure excitement. Pure excitement. It was really, you realize that this is a unique situation. It had a little bit of danger to it, because you're on a volcano. It's steaming the whole time. We're getting swarms of earthquakes and 00:23:00you could hear the rocks falling up in the crater all the time.

SS: Did you ever see any lava dome explosions?

BP: Not what we'd call explosions, but at night, we'd be camping out somewhere at night you'd look back and you'd see it glowing red. It was always steaming and smoke coming up, some days a lot, some days not so much. But it was always right there. You knew you were on a volcano and the Forest Service in those first couple of years, USGS had developed some sort of a forecasting model based on seismic patterns and they thought pretty confidently that they could give you 24-hour notice before an eruption, and we were camped out on Johnston Ridge at one of our sites where a geologist had been killed in the eruption. [David Johnston] We were up the ridge from where he had been and on the last day we 00:24:00were there, we were just about done putting in those plots, you had to have a handheld radio on 24 hours a day, because, if they had to call you out, they'd buzz you and we'd have to drive out. On the last day they said, okay the model says there's going to be an eruption. We don't know how big it's going to be, but you guys need to get out, and I said we're heading out later today anyway and so we'll just hurry that up. Sure enough, the next day there was a small eruption. It wouldn't have done us any harm sitting there, but it was reassuring that their models were working and that they were able to give us some heads up on when things were going to happen. But, yeah, it was pure excitement. We knew we were in a unique area. We were the only people out there, along with the other researchers. But the public wasn't allowed in and it was like we had the 00:25:00volcano to ourselves and it was just one giant outdoor laboratory. It was really exciting.

SS: Now what were some of your central assumptions, either specific axioms and paradigms or general, about ecological processes and recovery from major disturbance events, volcanic eruptions or otherwise, before you studied at St. Helens and the surrounding region?

BP: I think it was Gene Odum, one of my advisors at Georgia, was the old field ecologist of succession. He studied at Horseshoe Bend just off campus there in Athens, Georgia. He had actually published The Strategy of Ecosystems in Bioscience and had a huge reputation on successional processes and how ecosystems would reassemble through either primary or secondary disturbances. 00:26:00MacMahon and our whole lab there at Utah State were testing a lot of that sort of thing. You know in the basic form we knew was that, yes, you're going to have colonists. This had all been worked out pretty well in the general sense before. You would have the initial colonists, some sort of ecesis going on where species would sort out by competition and then the facilitation of the environment altering the microenvironment so the next species would occur. You would get some eventually going extinct and others new coming in. You get this relay of succession, this relay of species coming in. We kind of knew this was going to happen, but it was confounded by the gradient of disturbance from extreme primary succession on the Pumice Plain to just the varying degrees of tephra 00:27:00fall. You had the gradient of disturbance. Plus, you had all these different taxa. Nobody really knew in detail what the sequence of events would be and what the pathways would actually be. Are these things going to come across in waves? Are they going to look for particular islands and then radiate from there and what not? You have all this great theory that leads you to a very large number of hypothesis, but until you actually get out there and see which one is, how it's playing out, you don't know.

SS: How were some of those hypotheses, traditional successional hypotheses and otherwise, either supported, challenged, or overturned by the general studies at St. Helens, but then specific studies, experiences, results in your case or with 00:28:00your team and what you did?

BP: Well, I think the interesting thing is you can approach this at different levels. The concept of islands of fertility of these islands of plants or soil disturbances, like gopher mounds, for example, ant mounds, where things get started and then they can expand from there coupled with just natural little places where seeds can accumulate and the environment's just fine. Those were more or less expected, but it was so obvious to see if you would just have a meadow covered in white pumice and now you see islands of brown dirt where the gophers had dug them up, that was pretty cool and plants growing on those 00:29:00islands. Some of the things that we had observed in deserts, nurse plant phenomenon, animal burrowing and kind of the bioturbation of vertebrates, those were, we expected to see it and the landscape level part of that where you see it in some places, and you don't see it in others what's going on there? The overall landscape patterns were fascinating to watch. Then you superimpose erosion and erosion channels on top of these things, and, suddenly, where you have buried landscapes and meters of tephra and what not and you think okay it's primary succession for a long time here, you get a big storm and it cuts down through all that stuff.

SS: And you get to some real soil, right?

BP: And you're back in the original soil, and that original soil still has roots and seeds and stuff in it. You get these just suddenly popping out in the middle of this bleak landscape. Here's a [SS interrupts].

SS: Well, a lot of those seeds can go dormant for a long time.

BP: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, they can be there for years. You see these changes happening really very quickly, which was surprising as well. Then moving up at the larger scale, the legacies of what was actually there beforehand, what was the landscape like, the obvious difference there is clear-cut, versus the old-growth forests or second-growth forests and what was the condition of that forest at the time. Then even taking it up to the next scale, to the landscape scale, the ability of habitat patches to look at what is essentially beta and 00:31:00gamma diversities is that a lot of these species were very particular to some habitats, and at the landscape level you have an incredible degree of diversity that you would not necessarily have had in a completely forested, when everything was completely forested. Seeing that was pretty neat.

SS: So, you're saying in some respects you were studying a desert in a relative sense, or in a literal sense at least the on-the-ground conditions, irrespective of the fact that you're in a temperate zone.

BP: That's right.

SS: Wet, western slope of the Cascades type of climate.

BP: Yeah.

SS: But you had to treat it sort of like a desert, right?

BP: Right. Because the microhabitat on the Pumice Plain and the debris avalanche flow that was pretty harsh. The sun's beating down on it and it's hot and dry during the middle part of the summer, so the plants had to be really tough to 00:32:00survive there. But, of course, when you get into desert ecosystems, your successional process is not typical of an old field successional situation. We have a term for that called auto succession that it's an accumulation of species, but none of them really go away, at least not very many. You end up with adding species through time as they recolonize a disturbance area until you reattain the compliment of species that would normally be in a desert ecosystem. But, that's pretty much because all those species require their tolerance of the hot temperatures and the low moisture and what not. Out here we sort of expected 00:33:00the same thing to happen, but we didn't know what the timescale would be. The timing is really kind of an unknown. We know how long it takes to grow a clear-cut back to a forest. You got the rotations of the harvest and what not. We knew a lot about that already. But for this really unstudied, highly disturbed area how long does it take to really get those things back.

SS: Because there really had not been a lot of in-depth ecological studies of volcanic disturbed zones before this. There had been some, but [BP interrupts].

BP: That's right.

SS: But nothing like this and this in depth, correct?

BP: That's right. That's right and in a systematic fashion where all these different disciplines were working together in a coordinated fashion to look at everything. There were a lot of studies for example on Krakatoa down in 00:34:00Indonesia. So, there were some very good assessments of the rates at which plants came back there and what species of insects and birds and what not showed up.

SS: This would have been in the decade right after the big blast in 1883?

BP: That's right. That's right. Through the late [SS talks over BP] 1920s.

SS: Was that Dutch or English botanists?

BP: Mostly Dutch, mostly Dutch. Dammerman and his colleagues.

SS: How did some of those early studies even though the sophistication of analysis was less integrated and holistic as you would find later just because of the evolution of science and ecology, but how much did that stuff help you inform or give you a baseline?

BP: Well, we could easily expect to understand that there would be colonists that were functionally capable of getting there. Of course, you know, the 00:35:00difference between blowing up an island versus Mount St. Helens of course is you're surrounded by sea water. The colonization part is a lot different. They've got to come; your founding individuals have to come a long way away and if they can't fly that far they have to be able to swim or ride materials all the way over.

SS: Or they could blow, couldn't they?

BP: Yeah, right, yeah if there were really good winds. But here at Mount St. Helens you're surrounded by undisturbed area, so it's really no trouble getting across there. You just need to get, have the appropriate habitat as either corridors or targeted microsites, so that once you get there you could survive.

SS: Now, we may go back to a couple of these other concepts that are on my list, just kind of synopsize your research focus at Mount St. Helens, how that began and how that has developed over time and what it has taught you as well as what you think it has brought to the study of St. Helens but also the discipline or ecosystem science, the disciplines, plural, shall we say?

BP: The one thing that's jumped out at me is the different rates of species turnover among the different taxa. If we look at plants there are approximately on the debris avalanche and the Pumice Plane, Roger del Moral has found about 150 species of plants. Not many of those, just a few of the rare ones, have been 00:37:00extirpated in succession. They're all still there. They've been accumulating. That fits the auto succession component of a desert ecosystem. Essentially, they're still building up. It will take essentially shading out by alders and then eventually firs to extirpate those from that particular system. As it goes into forest, yes, we'll be able to see that that is occurring. But it's been 35 years and the plants are increasing, but none of them are dropping out. That's interesting. So, 35 years all of that has happened. If we look at birds: same story. Birds are increasing in species. They're the open grasslands birds and now shrublands, but you haven't lost any birds out there. Small mammals have 00:38:00been increasing but again in species richness you haven't lost any. They're still building up to the full complement. We look at insects and it depends on the group. If we look at grasshoppers, we're finally getting in 1995 and 2000 we have our first grasshopper nymphs on the Pumice Plain. That indicates that they're reproducing. All the other grasshoppers before that were migrants that came in during the summer and died there.

SS: In other words, it's the beginning of secondary succession in the most harshly hit area.

BP: Yeah, more or less.

SS: More or less?

BP: Yeah. It's just primary succession on down. You've got soil formation and plants and things. You finally got enough of an ecosystem and shelter for eggs of grasshoppers to survive and the nymphs are starting to be able to survive as well. Instead of an allochthonous system where all your organisms, your animals, 00:39:00are coming in from the outside, you're now being able to support them and produce them on site. It becomes an autochthonous in terms of grasshoppers. Some of the populations of course just explode when the conditions are right for them. They really take off. But it's the same patterns we've been following with plants and birds - you're adding species. The numbers are accumulating, but you haven't lost any. The beetles on the other hand are incredibly rapid in terms of turnover. The early days after the eruption the Pumice Plain was this giant cobble beach all the way across. You end up with stony soils, pumice tephra soils, which aren't really soils. It's just like walking on a floor of ping-pong 00:40:00balls almost. There's large interstitial spaces and what not. These carabid beetles in the genus Bembidion and some of the agertid (Agertidae) beetles that were out on the site are scavengers and predators and so all of these species are surviving on aerial fallout of insects that are flying in or being blown in across the Pumice Plain or across Spirit Lake. These insects just run out of gas as they're flying across and they fall down and they spiral down and hit on the Pumice Plain and then they're prey for these scavengers and predators that are on there. Or, if they're flying across Spirit Lake, they run out of gas over the lake, fall down, drown, and their bodies are washed up on shore with the flotsam 00:41:00and jetsam. There's these communities of scavengers and predators that are working the Pumice Plain, feeding on this fallout that's being imported to this system. As the soils change, it goes from these very gravelly soils to much finer soils that are almost like a Walmart parking lot. They're flat. They're hard. They're fine-textured and there aren't any hiding places anymore. But the plants still haven't really become established except in a few patches. At that point, you've got a different set of beetles that can start working it. As we looked at our data for the last 35 years on the Pumice Plain, there are only of the dozens of species that were there in 1981, '82, '83, there are only 3 species of that original list that are still out there. All the others have 00:42:00disappeared and have been replaced by other species. It's almost been replaced about 3 times now. The turnover's been just phenomenal. Now we're starting to see, finally, all of these things have been strong flyers that have been out there in the first 20, 25 years, but now we're starting to see the ambulatory ones, the species that don't have wings that had to walk from the edges in and search for a good habitat. It's really been one of the examples that here's one group of species that shows incredibly turnover, the relay succession that everybody's been talking about, but they do it really fast, whereas plants and birds and things are very slow.

SS: What's the life cycle of that beetle?

BP: The different beetles that [SS interrupts]?

SS: Well, the different beetles, shall we say.

BP: Yeah. They'll generally go one year as an adult and they'll be laying eggs 00:43:00in the soil and the larvae or soil dwelling and also predators and so they'll spend some time in the soil and then come out. A total cycle is probably 2 years.

SS: What would be your estimate of how many of them survived to full adulthood?

BP: Oh, boy, I'll bet it was pretty low. Easily less than 5% or 10% or 20%.

SS: So, the competition dynamic is really intense out there?

BP: Oh, I'm sure, yes. Yeah, especially among some of these larger populations, because, of course, in competition theory you know you're most competitive opponent is a member of your own species, because they do everything just the same way you do. These resources can be limited. [recording cuts out].

SS: Regarding the soils, would you consider that there is an early proto-soil developing on the Pumice Plain yet?

BP: Yes. It is. The pumice is weathered down so that there are quite a few still cobbles and gravels of pumice in there. I was just out yesterday collecting cores, but they are surrounded by a very sandy, loam soil that has been supporting a lot of the vegetation and the mosses. One of the observations from yesterday's work is that there is virtually on the sites I've been working on the Pumice Plain there's virtually 100% cover now of mosses, grasses, forbs, and occasional shrubs and young firs coming in, but mostly it's moss and grass and forbs.

SS: Which is the first friendly habitat you might say that's been out there?

BP: Yeah.

SS: For potential growth of whatever species, correct?

BP: Exactly. That's right. We start to see an increase in herbivorous species. The grasshoppers, obviously, since the last 15 years out of 35 it took 20 years to get grasshoppers out there where they were successfully reproducing. The first 19 years there were grasshoppers, but they weren't successful. They hadn't established populations yet.

SS: Going up a little bit, what is surviving living in the crater?

BP: You know, I don't know. I'm sure there's a bunch of insects that would be up in there. The slopes of the crater incredibly unstable, so the ability for plants to get a hold in there and survive for very long is probably very limited opportunities there. Things like small mammals and what not, they'd probably 00:46:00only be transient, if they were trying to get in there. I don't know if birds go in there. I just haven't spent enough time up there.

SS: Now if you were going to go outward from the Pumice Plain towards the various degrees of disturbances and degrees, the types of landscapes that this produced, how would you take what you just talked about regarding the Pumice Plain mainly and extend those principles and observations of what you just said and take it in gradients out toward even where we are right now, for instance, kind of a synopsis of that?

BP: Right, right. The basic thing is for a zoologist, looking at the animals, is there are two components. There's the substrate. Are you in the right type of soils for an animal that needs to burrow or put eggs in the soil? The architecture of the landform plus the organics there, whether they're living 00:47:00trees or logs or stumps or something. Finally, the food resources. Those three things. Then of course superimposed on that are your bionic interactions of disease and predators and parasitoids and all this kind of stuff. Given those constraints, as you come out from the Pumice Plain and you get into the blowdown zone, for example, well, now you've got a bunch of dead trees lying on the ground. They went flush with soil that was already present so they're in contact with the soil. The microbes and the bugs that were underneath that soil are still alive after the eruption. They're also a lot of areas where there was snow on the ground that buffered them even more. But a lot of those species are now survivors as part of the legacy, and they have to either keep going or perish. 00:48:00They're going to either be able to adapt to the new environment or not. Well, if you're a fungus feeder and a decomposer you're suddenly in hog heaven because you've got a lot of material to work on. The fungi are going crazy working on these logs, starting to decompose these things and then the species that would feed on fungi and there are quite a few beetles and other insects. They do very well.

SS: Would the decomp of these large logs from the blowdown be slower because it's not in the middle of a forest where the moisture would stay more readily?

BP: Yes.

SS: Would that be true?

BP: That would be very true. At the same time, they're also getting pounded by 00:49:00UV radiation.

SS: That's producing a different dynamic.

BP: That's right. That's right. It can be knocking them down, but we do get an awful lot of moisture out here. Many of these logs are decomposing fairly quickly, melting into the ground and subjected to these things. But one of the studies we did back in 1986 was a nutrient cycling decomposition study and I did this study based on mice, mouse carcasses, because it's already well-known in the literature that different substrates of plants, different types of plants, will decompose at different rates based on nitrogen content and lignin content and so on. The problem is, if you go from the Pumice Plain where you've got lupines and pearly everlasting and fireweed, up into old growth forest, and you 00:50:00want to see how the nutrient cycle and decomposition rates are going, you get an old-growth forest, so you don't find fireweed, pearly everlasting, and lupines. They're not part of the forest floor community. There's nothing to compare directly across in the plant material stuff. What we ended up doing is saying we do have deer mice and voles in all of these places, so let's use animal carcasses and see because that at least is a common substrate.

SS: You're talking about in the areas outside the Pumice Plain?

BP: That's right. So, Pumice Plain going through the blowdown zone into the scorch zone into the tephra fall zone and into old-growth, undisturbed forest. We essentially did a litter bag experiment with mouse bodies, mouse carcasses. Sure enough, the decomposition rates changed as you went from old-growth forest 00:51:00where it was moist and cool, but still pretty warm. Things would decompose very quickly there. As you moved up that disturbance gradient out finally into the Pumice Plain decomposition rates got slower and slower and slower. That proved to be quite confirmed our hypothesis that as the architecture changes in these disturbed vegetation areas where you have less shading and higher temperatures and less moisture that it starts to influence these ecosystem processes.

SS: How has your scientific work at St. Helens been assisted or changed by the technological revolutions that have occurred since 1980, whether it be in terms 00:52:00of instrumentation or the ability to process data?

BP: Probably not very much. We're still using pitfall traps, like we did at the beginning. It's still microscope work, pinning and identifying the species, counting them up and recording and everything's pretty much the same.

SS: Okay. Now, I've got a series of concepts that I'm going to kind of throw your way and just see how you would like to address them from your own perspective and your own research.

BP: Okay.

SS: Okay? Survival.

BP: Survival is of course critical to the species in the different disturbance 00:53:00zones. Yes, we want to see year after year if the species continues to exist in a particular place and what happens to it when it finally starts to disappear and how long it takes to disappear. Survival is critical to that. It's really calibrating the turnover rate is essentially a survival factor.

SS: Immigration.

BP: Same story. At what point we know that for example that all these different species of insects or small mammals they exist in the surrounding countryside, perhaps in very specialized places, but nonetheless they're there and they're capable of dispersal. Immigration is going to indicate to us that either the corridors are now open, that the habitat from the edges to the interior has 00:54:00changed sufficiently that these species can move through that and that the environment where we're doing our sampling is now suitable for them. That's the recruitment. It's the flip side of survival.

SS: Okay.

BP: When do these things arrive.

SS: How long did it take you to become firm in your understanding of the things you just talked about, for instance, in these two previous concepts that were related? To become confident that that this was happening in this way at St. Helens.

BP: Yeah. The concepts were fine. They're pretty ingrained. They're well-known in the literature. We're taught that in classes from day one in general ecology. That part was pretty straightforward. It was the details of it and the different trophic groups, what is their survival? What is their rate of arrival? 00:55:00Immigration out of the sites? Are some groups better at it than others? You can hypothesize all you want ahead of time, but really you have to sit there and look at them and actually document which ones are coming in. I was fairly surprised after you know 10 years and you look out across and there's some patches of lupines and grasses and things are coming in, but we're still not seeing grasshopper survival. Why is that? Is it soils or what? What's going on? Just you come across these questions that you know sooner or later, now the grasshoppers are there and they're reproducing like gangbusters. But what led to that, you know, what was the tipping point that allowed them to do that?

SS: Geomorphology and vegetation changes.

BP: Well, certainly the geomorphology of the landscapes, the hillslopes is being driven mostly by erosion and stabilization by vegetation. Geomorphology of the streams is, again, the water action, the energy and the volume of water coming down, so those things are carving new stream channels and what not. It's a mountain of fairly unstable material. Things happen pretty fast out there, and, so, I wasn't too surprised to see that. It was similarly on coal mines overburdened piles of unstable material. We'd seen that sort of thing before, but certainly not on this scale. The geomorphology part is quite, you know, not 00:57:00surprising. It was surprising the speed at which it happened. But that's because it's a very wet climate, so you get a lot of water. If it was a desert, if it was a true desert, things would be much slower. What was the second part of your, geomorphology...?

SS: Geomorphology and vegetation change.

BP: Vegetation change, yeah. That has been, you know, we knew it was coming. I've been particularly pleased that I've lived long enough to see the Pumice Plain where I've been working actually achieve 100% vegetation cover now, or 98%. It's very close. Some, I note just in the last couple of days, scientists have lamented that oh it's changing so fast. We hate to see it change and what 00:58:00not. I'm thrilled that I'm alive to see it. That actually I could get through that much, much like seeing a forest regenerate after a fire or something like that. If it was going to happen, I'm glad I was here to see it.

SS: Nutrient cycling and chemical interactions.

BP: Yeah, well the nutrient cycling part is interesting because that's something after my interest here. I've been disappointed that there hasn't been more work on nutrient cycling out here. Aside from my, in the first book, after 20, 25 years of studies out here my study on mouse carcass decomposition was the only nutrient cycling stuff that had been done. It was all, no one's gone out and done litter bags and what not to ever ascertain these rates of litter decomp. 00:59:00They can still be done, but, of course, things are changing rapidly now. I would have liked to have seen a little bit more done on that.

SS: What would be, from what your experience of 30+ years, what would be your, shall we say, theorem going into studying that if you were going to test something or speculate about what you think might be true or that you wanted to find out and test it regarding nutrient cycling?

BP: Nutrient cycling, yeah. Well, it's kind of, some things are being done. So, a number of scientists have been looking at organic content accumulation in soils. That kind of gives you the soil buildup process and carbon development. Of course, they get nitrogen and phosphorus and a number of things out of that as well. The decomposition rates, what is the fate of litter out there when a 01:00:00plant dies what happens to it? Does it just shrivel up and blow away to somewhere else? Fall into a stream and, eventually, get washed down into the lakes? You know I'm not sure that we have a real good idea on that. But, certainly, there's obviously a lot of biomass that's building up out there. You can do those budgets. We have some of the scientists are doing budgets of nitrogen and phosphorus and what not and biomass in Spirit Lake. The aquatic systems are working pretty well. Yeah, overall, the spatial distribution and timing of decomposition processes would be interesting to know. The 01:01:00microtopography of soil buildup and development is fascinating.

SS: And that's happened even in the most harshly hit areas, correct?

BP: That's right.

SS: What's the normal time for fully developed soils to develop from something like this in the most extreme zones in terms of before St. Helens? What would have people thought?

BP: Well, certainly in arid lands you don't get soil buildup. It's really a question of weathering the rock parent material by sun, wind, water, things of this nature with some biotic interactions, lichens for example can break these things down. I guess the, yeah, I'm not sure. The landscape level patterns of 01:02:00this is something that Mount St. Helens can probably teach us, but it's almost like I wish it would erupt again so we can do everything over and say we kind of understand the gaps of where we've missed stuff.

SS: You'd like a 35-year mulligan?

BP: That's right, exactly. Let's do it over! Do it over! Because now we'd really have it done very well. I think that's the advantage of Charlie and Fred and going down to Chile and other places because they can say okay here's what we really need to look at.

SS: Now in your view what ecological research remains undone at Mount St. Helens? I will ask you specifically to your specialty what you've done here, but also as a person who's seen this scientific program unfold, comments on both of those?

BP: Sure. I'm not sure that we'd know very much about corridors of animal movement for colonization. We don't know the specifics of because that would require some sort of radiotelemetry, some kinds of studies. The fine, fine grain movement of animals is not very well-known, except for things like elk.

SS: Megafauna, in other words.

BP: Right. I think nutrient cycling could have been done better. Soil development could have been done, at least on our sites, we should have done it better. It's hard to find even published records of sand, silt, and clay composition in gravel and cobble and what not, just texture analyses of soils of 01:04:00these things. They've been done in some places, but not extensively that I can find. The vegetation has been covered pretty well. That's one of the bright spots. The aquatic systems seem to have been done pretty well.

SS: That started with Jim Sedell, didn't it?

BP: Mm-hmm. Right. Cliff Dahm, Chuck Hawkins from Utah State and Cliff from the University of New Mexico. There were some things that have been done very well. I would probably do more in terms of the insect world. We've concentrated on the surface-active arthropods. But I would have encouraged other entomologists to do plant-dwelling arthropods as well to try to pick up more and more of those, 01:05:00flying ones, malaise traps and things. But all this takes a lot of money, takes a lot of funding to get all the expertise necessary to do that.

SS: What has it been like to work with the National Monument in terms of the science zones and permits and things like that over time?

BP: It's been a piece of cake. It's been no trouble at all. Charlie takes care of that and Peter Frenzen has been really excited about people coming up here, so there's no static at all. They're very helpful, very amenable to getting out and doing things.

SS: Based on your long relationship with this research in this region and the mountain, what would be some ecological prognostications about St. Helens that 01:06:00you might want to say I can see this happening?

BP: Yeah, I think the one thing a lot of us have talked about is, aside from the actual crater, for the landscape in 100 years the casual tourist will never know that an eruption took place. Spirit Lake will have trees all around it again. It will be this idyllic lake to go fishing and canoeing and what not in and aside from looking up at a snow-covered Mount St. Helens with this gaping crater in the middle of it [SS interrupts].

SS: You won't have the Fujiyama effect anymore.

BP: That's right.

SS: But you'll have something similar to what it was before? You actually believe that's in 100 years.

BP: That's right. Yep. Because in 35 years already you're seeing huge numbers of 01:07:00firs and pine out on the Pumice Plain. They will be putting on a foot a year in growth and so in 20 years' time, they're 20-30 feet taller than they are now. While they appear to be relatively inconspicuous now, there's actually a lot of them out there, so it's going to turn into almost a taiga or savannah type situation with lots of trees, very park-like. It'll look very park-like out there. As those fill in, they're only going to be 20, 30 years behind the larger ones that are getting established now. It's really, it's going to be a forested landscape again until you get up above the tree line almost and there it's going 01:08:00to be an obvious volcano. But that would be my guess is that the ability to recognize this as a highly disturbed volcanic landscape is going to be fading pretty fast.

SS: What previous research in this area and on the mountain - were any of you able to tap into that happened before 1980?

BP: For me, the work that was done at the H.J. Andrews for the insects of what you would expect to find in old-growth forest has been very valuable. I still use their publications today.

SS: Who would have been some of the key players there?

BP: Oh, Jack Lattin, Andy Moldenke, Gary Parsons was a student of Jack's and is still helping us with beetle identifications. Dave Lightfoot did a lot of the 01:09:00orthopteran. He's down at University of New Mexico now. There's a number of people who have done a lot of work in putting the species list together and a habitat affinities and what not. That's been very valuable. Then there were a number of publications on the small mammals of the Pacific Northwest. You have good distributional data. You could put together the community that ought to be in an old-growth coniferous forest.

SS: Did you ever read Donald Lawrence's stuff?

BP: That name's familiar.

SS: That's off the record. Capstone question: how would you say that scientific research here has affected our understanding of ecological processes, disturbance ecology in particular?

BP: I think Jerry Franklin when he was talking the other night kind of hit it. The legacy part of the specifics in a particular area of whether there were logs, what the preconditions were, whether it was a clearcut or not. How old the trees were? Was there a serendipitous nature of the timing of the eruption, whether your trees were on the lee side of a slope or the front side? All of the details, and it teaches you that the details matter and it expands the universe of possible outcomes for a given disturbance. The criticisms have been of some of the scien-teers that Mount St. Helens was so unique. It was a one-time event, 01:11:00hardly ever going to be repeated. But the lesson of Mount St. Helens is that it is a one-time event, but it has variations on a theme and, yes, if you could make the volcano erupt a thousand times you would have a really good understanding of volcanic eruptions.

SS: You'd have your baseline, your controls, and you could go through time.

BP: That's right. Exactly. You could have it erupt in May and in June and in July and in August and you could have it erupt at night or during the day and stuff, because the fact that it erupted in the morning, it's daytime, a lot of the nocturnal species are underground. It got the daytime ones. It could have happened the other way around. It was really unique.

SS: How do you think the rapid salvage logging that happened, especially in the 01:12:00private zones, affected the ecology of the area, because it was just, they did it so fast and so complete and they wanted to even do the Forest Service lands, but they only got a little of that, right?

BP: That's right.

SS: How would you say that affected the ecology, but even the science?

BP: Well, certainly, I mean their mission is to grow trees. It's a big tree farm. They were very effective at it. They were able to salvage it and move on. How did it affect the science? Well, you would have liked to have had more larger areas to examine; more replication. Most of the Weyerhaeuser land was right in the main path of the blast up to the northwest, so it was, you know, you could have used more land. But I think we have a, you know the Monument itself covers a lot of the topography and the disturbance zones.

SS: If you don't mind, talk to me a little about the collaborative dynamic that has developed here. Obviously, we are here at the Pulse, which has been going on since year 1, I believe.

BP: Just about, yeah.

SS: Or a form of the Pulse. It's matured and gotten bigger and changed, but how would you say that the collaborative dynamic that has happened here has affected what has been done here scientifically, but also culturally in terms of the institutional effort that Big Science can do?

BP: Yeah, and that's really, the collaboration of all these different groups and individuals who donate their time and resources and urge their students to work here, it's critical to this sort of, the gestalt as well as the comprehensive 01:14:00nature of this, because one person, if we could clone Charlie, it would be much better off, but you have a lot of experts in different fields who contribute their time and energy here and try to orchestrate that would take a huge amount of effort and bureaucracy and funding. But this has literally been done on a series of small grants and small collaboration of volunteers. The value of this project is that it does cover everything, from plants to water to wildlife to nutrient cycles in soils. You would need a whole community to do that. That's really critical. One person can't do it all.

SS: Ecology.

BP: Although Charlie comes close.

SS: Ecology as a science, or, really, I would say a gestalt of sciences, as you used the word. It's kind of a humbling discipline, isn't it?

BP: Oh, it is. It is!

SS: In the sense of what you have to try to know, correct?

BP: Exactly. Exactly. This was one of the things, too, that I was, and this is I believe where being a student of someone like Jim MacMahon was really outstanding and a benefit for both Charlie and myself and the other folks out of Utah State that worked up here, is the first summer I was here I was out with Roger and Larry, Larry Bliss and Roger del Moral, and these are outstanding botanists. Larry was a fantastic ecophysiologist, and I could name almost every plant, certainly to genus, a lot of them to species, but I knew what they were, 01:16:00and I knew the lifestyles of perennials and annuals and things like that. We were up and there's a couple of, there's a golden-mantled ground squirrel and a yellow pine chipmunk running around, and these guys didn't know what they were. They didn't know the difference between them. They had no idea. They were some sort of squirrel. But, that was it. It just didn't register. I always thought that that was really odd, that you would be so specialized that you were kind of ignorant about everything outside of your specialty, whereas MacMahon had always taught his students to embrace everything. Yeah, you take soils classes. You take aquatic classes, even though you're working in deserts. You take vegetation. You know your plants. You know your birds and things like this. It was really a push to understand as much of nature around you as you possibly could.

SS: Well, I think it's the ecosystem science as it's developing the last 30, 40 years is a return to what I like to call Humboldtian holism.

BP: There you go.

SS: That old, when geography really kind of meant everything.

BP: Yes, that's right.

SS: Humboldt obviously went around the world with his assistant, and they try to describe everything. Although that was in some ways an impossible venture if you ever try to read about Humboldt's attempt to write his grand opus called The Cosmos, he couldn't do it. Of course, at the same time was the development of the modern disciplines. You see this intellectual stove piping that's happened ever since.

BP: Right, right.

SS: What you're really saying is that I think that's being inverted at least on some level where you're trying to combine the specialization, expertise, the evolution of knowledge and methodologies with shall we say a glance back to the past.

BP: Yep. That's quite true.

SS: Does that make sense?

BP: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's why I think Jim MacMahon and Jerry Franklin, those guys, Fred Swanson, they're really renaissance men. They understand so much about a wide variety of things and can integrate them and see how they fit together. That is a rare talent. It takes motivation and drive to quite that level of knowledge as well as just an open mind to ask the question, "How does that influence that?" It's been a privilege to be associated with them for all these years up here.

SS: Has the Pulse idea, as you see it here, unique in your experience? I know there are other collective ventures.

BP: It is.

SS: But this seems to be a more sustained, committed venture.

BP: It is.

SS: Would that be true in your experience?

BP: Yes, it is. So, I've been involved 14 ½, 15 years with this Sevilleta LTER program and other LTERs along the way. Those are continuous and now the NEON operation [National Ecological Observatory Network], I've been involved with developing that and being reviewer for NSF and whatnot for the program. Those are kind of the epitome of juggernaut type science program to give long-term data. The Pulses here were an absolutely brilliant idea by Charlie and Jerry and Fred to provide large numbers of data sets every 5 years, knowing that this is a very long-term process. We're in this successional process for 100 years yet to 01:20:00come. Keeping everything up every 5 years to kind of reinvigorate and update the databases and also to find out which ones are not being paid attention to, which ones do we have to step up and cover. Logistically, intellectually, comradery fashioned, this is definitely an absolute brilliant idea to do this.

SS: How do you like the fact that last maybe 10, 15 years the arts and the humanities have been brought in?

BP: It's been fun, yeah!

SS: What does that do for you as a, there's no such thing as a pure science, but as a science guy. What does that, when there's writers and artists and poets and this thing is going on where the traditional science community is, I won't say challenged, but it seeing a different lens, or seeing it through a little bit different lens?

BP: I think what it does is it gives scientists pause to say, okay, yeah you 01:21:00guys come back here and think the poem, they respected the mountain, but now they love the mountain after it showed its awesome power and what not. That's an interesting concept. You just kind of say, yeah, these things have kind of beautiful, intrinsic values. I look at a landscape like this and say, whoa, okay I'm looking at 800 trees per hectare per acre here and that's x amount of nitrogen and I can just imagine the phosphorous cycling in here and the huge amount of diversity in these things and what not, but an artist sees it as a beautiful landscape. It reminds us that, hey, we can look at this in a number of different ways.

SS: You and I, for the record, we're sitting here on a logging road.

BP: Yep, an old logging road.

SS: And we're looking across the valley at Mt. Rainier, the grand mountain of the Northwest.

BP: That's right. There's lots of glaciers and snow all over it.

SS: I'll use that to frame one of my last questions, this is what you consider a traditional alpine aesthetic. The traditional grand beauty of a beautiful mountain. How would you characterize aesthetics and beauty applied to the mountain that we can't see on the other side of the hill, Mount St. Helens, and all that surrounds it?

BP: Well, the beauty of Mount St. Helens is it shows geologic processes in our lifetime. You know, you go in a mountain range and you know this took millions of years to build up and what not, and it's shaped by geologic events, but Mount St. Helens occurred, the eruption occurred in a timeframe that we can understand 01:23:00and absorb. It's great to see these examples of geologic change happening right before our eyes. That's the beauty of that. It's not static. I look at Mt. Rainier and I realize the science tells me yes that has been a volcano that's erupted a lot of times. It's built up that mountain here, but it's still static. It isn't moving and stuff like that. You look at Mount St. Helens, every time I look at it, it's a dynamo. It's dynamic. It's moving. It's developing. It's in motion through time.

SS: What would you say the most important scientific lesson that you have learned at Mount St. Helens?

BP: Well, just the rates of turnover of different groups of species and how to 01:24:00use natural history to explain that and, secondly, the landscape diversity of a single disturbance event has created so many environments that have collectively given you a landscape diversity that greatly exceeds what would have been here, if it hadn't erupted. You know through time it's essentially this has been the story of the Cascades all along. It's a dynamic equilibrium of these patches show up spatially across the whole mountain range.

SS: How would you best synopsize or encapsulate your history and role here at this mountain at the Pulse studying the mountain over 33 years now, correct?

BP: Yeah. So, I guess my role is, again, working with the insects, a little bit 01:25:00with nutrient cycling, helping Charlie with the small mammal work and helping get those early grants to get the whole thing started.

SS: Because it does take money.

BP: It does take money. That's right. You've got to be there and be willing to do it and be interested in it. That's been pretty good, and I like following along with the insect work, because it's so diverse, again, Roger has 150 species of plants; I've got over 450 species of beetles. For every plant, there's a couple of specialist insects plus the omnivores and predators and parasitoids and pollinators and everything else. It's a good group to work with, and I'm glad to see more and more students are interested in different aspects of this.

SS: This is a much more diverse environment than what you see around the central area of the volcano, correct?

BP: Yes, so we're basically the insects that have come in and established and are looking for these microhabitats that the volcano has created.

SS: New niches, right?

BP: Yeah, along those lines. They exist in little tiny spots here and there and they've gotten very good through evolutionary time and dispersing and finding similar spots and surviving.

SS: If you wanted to say one last thing about Mount St. Helens, the Pulse this year, anything about the experience here you want to kind of give a capstone statement?

BP: Well, I feel real privileged to have worked with the people that have been here, the leaders over the years and the ability to come up and have long-term 01:27:00studies going on and Charlie and all his numerous people that have kept the program alive up here, because I know how much effort it takes just in running my program in New Mexico. This is even bigger than that. It's been a pleasure working with all these people and keeping the data stream coming, so we learn more every time we come up here.

SS: Sounds good. I appreciate your time.

BP: My pleasure, thanks Sam! Appreciate it.

SS: You bet.