The Living Snow Project: Adventure-Based Community Enabled Science

The Living Snow Project is a community enabled science (aka "citizen science") program that engages the outdoor recreation community in science that is revealing impacts of climate change on biology in snowy alpine environments. The primary goal of the LSP is to support scientific efforts in my lab at WWU, to characterize snow microbiome biodiversity and distribution across the Cascades and other regional mountains over time.  We want to understand where snow algae bloom, how they disperse around the landscape, and how their communities evolve over time in response to climate-driven environmental changes. To do this, we need to collect robust sample datasets from as many locations as possible. And we need these samples over time to document communities from year to year.  So far, LSP has processed samples from 2013-2018. It looks like we have some new “species” of snow algae in the PNW – the strains we see here are genetically distinct from samples sequenced from Europe, Greenland, Japan, and Antarctica. We also see that each community (the algae + bacteria, fungi, and other amoeba-like things) in a region are different.  With more samples, we will be able to understand how random this variability is. We have also identified that snow algae communities in the Cascades form assemblages that are found in distinct environments across the region, and some of these assemblages live in low elevation snowy environments that are currently extremely threatened due to impending loss of habitat.

A secondary goal of the LSP is to learn how participation in citizen science can increase participants’ further engagement in conservation and facilitates conservation attitudes and behavior change.