Research sites to monitor Olympic Mountain plants

The Olympic Mountains are being used to study climate change after sites were set up for that purpose this past summer.

In late July and early August, Western Washington University Professor Eric DeChaine, along with 10 students from the university and scientists from the Missouri Botanical Garden, hiked up into the mountains to set up Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA) sites.

“It’s a system of monitoring Alpine plant responses to climate change in real time,” DeChaine said. “It was started years ago in Austria. Since then, they have a whole protocol that anybody doing this has to use so all the studies can be compared to one another.”