Photographs of John Bishop’s research and Mount St. Helens
Bishop (center) with his high school and WSU Vancouver assistants Tahir Ahmad, Kevin Krohn, Shannon Wills, Matt Ogburn, Joshua Seeds, and Rachel Ikehara-Martin.
Early morning sun on Mount St. Helens.
With Mount Adams in the distance, Matt Ogburn starts preparing for another day on St. Helens.
At the trailhead leading onto the pumice plain, Bishop and his crew prepare for the hike in to examine test plots.
Bishop and student crew begin the long hike into the pumice plain beneath St. Helens’s crater.
Trekking through an ashen landscape.
Dendrochronologist David Yamaguchi–he studies tree rings as indicators of climatic and environmental conditions—has examined the question of how long it will take for the devastated area near Spirit Lake to return to a mature closed-canopy forest. His answer: 200 years. This is actually quite a rapid succession. Much of the area around Crater Lake in Oregon, which was created by an eruption nearly 6,000 years ago, is still barren.
Late morning winds blow plumes of volcanic dust off the rim of the St. Helens crater.
Elk graze on the pumice plain. Although the destruction of the surrounding forest cleared the way for good forage, it remains sparse on the pumice plain.
The lava dome within the St. Helens crater.
Lupinus lepidus. Scientists found the first lupine plant growing on the pumice plain in 1981, only one year after the eruption. The plant was miles from any other vegetation.
Lupinus lepidus. This species of lupine grows on the slopes of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, usually at an elevation of 6,000-8,000 feet. On St. Helens, it grows at 3,000-6,000 feet.
A mesh bag protects part of a lupine plant from predators in one of Bishop’s experiments.
A lupine decimated by insect herbivores.
Matt Ogburn and Bishop check enclosures used to study the effect of insect herbivores and their insect predators on the spread of lupine colonies.
Bishop and Ogborn document plant colonization on the pumice plain.
Ogburn and Bishop measure the density of plants on the pumice plain.
Ogborn and Bishop search for moths and their herbivorous caterpillars to take back to the laboratory in Vancouver.
A collection of similar moth species provides a reference in identifying herbivores of lupines.
Bishop grows lupines and their herbivores in his Vancouver laboratory in order to more specifically determine the effect of their interaction on soil nutrient levels.
Jennifer Apple is a postdoctoral researcher in Bishop’s laboratory.
