Native Food Plants of the Northwest: Ecology, Culture and Management in a Changing World

s from 12 talks (in order of presentation), followed by 4 posters (in alphabetical order) CHANGING PHENOLOGY OF NORTHWESTERN SHRUBS. Janet Prevéy and Constance Harrington, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, 3625 93rd Avenue SW, Olympia, WA, 98512-1101; jprevey@fs.fed.us How is the timing of flowering and fruiting of northwestern shrubs changing as the climate changes? To address this question, we utilized a wide variety of citizen scientist and USFS monitoring plot data to identify climate variables that best predicted the timing of flowering and fruit ripening of several culturally important food-producing shrubs: huckleberry, salal, Oregon grape, and hazelnut. We used this synthesized dataset to develop models of the timing of flowering and fruiting for the four species, and to predict how the timing of fruiting would change in the future. We found that flowering dates of all species were best predicted by mean or maximum spring temperatures, whereas timing of fruit ripening was best predicted by mean summer temperature and accumulated growing degree days. Preliminary phenology models for these species indicate that the ripening of fruits and nuts will advance an average of 25 days by 2055 based on climate projections for a business-as-usual emission scenario. Additionally, we found that flowering dates for at least one species have already advanced considerably over the recent past. An exceptionally long record of flowering observations (19632016) of Oregon grape in Salem, Oregon shows that flowering has already advanced by 5 days per decade, with flowering occurring an average of 50 days earlier now than it did in the 1960s. These large shifts in phenology have the potential to greatly alter trophic relationships, plant-pollinator interactions, and the timing of traditional harvests in the future. MAPPING THE KEYSTONE PLANT SPECIES, HUCKLEBERRY (VACCINIUM MEMBRANECEUM), USING REMOTE SENSING IMAGERY. Tabitha A. Graves1 Carolyn Shores2, Nate Mikle1; 1US Geological Survey, Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, 38 Mather Drive, PO Box 169 West Glacier, Montana 59936; 2School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98040; tgraves@usgs.gov Black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) is a keystone plant species that provides food and shelter for wildlife species and is a culturally and economically important resource for humans, particularly indigenous communities in both the United States and Canada. As such, understanding where huckleberries are on the landscape and how their distribution is changing in response to disturbance such as fire, will inform decisions ranging from forest, fire, and recreation management. We used two approaches to map huckleberry shrubs in Glacier National Park, Montana. Using methods easily accessible to wildlife and forest managers, we predicted huckleberry presence based on 1) a single-date classification of NAIP imagery using the shrub’s