“I don’t do fire.”
That’s Assistant Professor Anna Bergstrom describing her early career focus. Now she’s leading a project funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study the impact of fire on streambeds in the Mountain West.
What led to the shift in research focus? A confluence of factors: expertise, community and need. As a watershed hydrologist and biogeochemist, Bergstrom is well-positioned to study the landscapes fire leaves behind. Her colleague Professor Jen Pierce introduced her to field sites studying post-fire debris flow. And as wildfire becomes more common in a warming West, land managers and the public need the insights Bergstrom’s research can provide.
Fire, and fire again
Bergstrom’s CAREER award will focus on water quality at sites that have been burned by multiple wildfires in recent years. She will look specifically at streambeds feeding the Payette River, in the region affected most recently by the Wapiti Fire in 2024, and before that by a fire also called Wapiti in 2018. Fires like those leave an impact on the landscape, and that impact flows into Idaho rivers.
“When you burn all of the vegetation and then make it really mobile, you can get those nutrients that were held in the vegetation to the streams,” Bergstrom said. “After that, microbes living in the streams can make use of those nutrients and the ecosystem in the stream can start to respond.”
That is what the existing body of research tells us about streambeds affected by a single fire, but what about areas burned by multiple fires? “We don’t have a ton of data on what happens when you re-burn a site that’s been burned,” Bergstrom said.
Bergstrom will collect and analyze data on these re-burned sites. Small streams in the Idaho mountains may seem inconsequential, but these streams feed Idaho’s water system.
“We’re not going all the way to the reservoirs, but we are moving down the South Fork of the Payette to look at how those change as you get farther and farther away from the wildfire perimeter,” Bergstrom said.
Algae blooms, fueled by increased nutrient load upstream, can close reservoirs to recreational use and threaten wildlife. “Regulators need to be able to predict when these algal blooms are coming down and if there’s anything they can do about it.”
Safety first
Bergstrom’s CAREER grant also includes a critical education component addressing field safety in geology and other field-based sciences. Researchers working in these fields often find themselves at remote field sites, where injuries can turn life-threatening in an instant.
“There has been a culture of ‘just rub some dirt on it and you’ll be fine’,” Bergstrom said, but she aims to change that.
Many people drawn to these disciplines have hobbies like backpacking, rock climbing or backcountry skiing that prepare them for dangerous wilderness situations. However, that is not always the case, especially for students working on research projects or taking field classes.
Bergstrom will adapt existing training materials, meant for smaller teams going on longer field trips, for a more general audience.
“We want to make this field something that anyone could participate in,” Bergstrom said. “And on the rare occasion that something goes wrong, we want to make sure people are capable of handling that.”
This publication was made possible by the National Science Foundation CAREER Program under award number 2539349.