THE WHITEBARK PINE growing beneath Yosemite National Park’s peaks look deceptively simple in their beauty — green needles and hardy trunks against a backdrop of grey granite and blue Sierra Nevada skies.

Yet these high-elevation trees, the linchpin of complex ecosystems in mountains across the American West, are experiencing extreme threats, including a deadly fungus that causes white pine blister rust, a disease which chokes whitebark pine of its nutrients. Scientists are now working against the clock to identify which of the trees’ genes might be the key to protecting them.

Nancy Bockino, a whitebark pine ecologist with the Wyoming-based Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, says this iconic pine’s impact extends beyond its high-country home: “They really protect the watershed. If you go up in the mountains and you look where the snow deposits in the winter, you’ll see whitebarks catching the snow.” The trees shade the snow and slow down the melting process, allowing spring runoff to feed streams and rivers at a sustainable pace.

NEW URGENCY, NEW APPROACHES

Bockino is part of a network made up of researchers, forest managers, cone collectors, tree geneticists, and government, nonprofit and Tribal organizations working to protect whitebark pine. Their work has long been fueled by a love of these iconic trees and their high-mountain ecosystems. But their efforts became more urgent in 2022 when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced it would be listing the whitebark pine as threatened on the Endangered Species List.

The move has catalyzed support for protecting existing stands of whitebark and developing new ways to accelerate reforestation, where needed. A notable example is a five-year agreement between American Forests and the National Park Service to restore the species across its range. The agreement funded the efforts of Bockino and her team to collect whitebark pine cones and needles — a process that involves finding healthy trees on the landscape, caging cones from seed-loving critters each spring, and then returning to the trees in the fall to gather cones. These cones, along with needle clippings, are then evaluated by researchers to identify disease resistance, both using traditional approaches and through the Whitebark Pine Genome Project. The project was started at the University of California, Davis and is now hosted by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, a partner of American Forests since 2016.

Humans have particular genes, or combinations of genes, that give them certain qualities, such as eye color, or make them more susceptible to disease, such as genetic mutations linked to high cholesterol. Trees’ genes work the same way. Yet, the complete sequence of whitebark pine DNA, also called its genome, is 10 times as long as human DNA.

AIMING FOR ENORMOUS IMPACT

Peering into the DNA of whitebark pine could ultimately help forest managers speed up and reduce the cost of the process of identifying healthy trees. Doing so would help them get more of the seedlings most likely to thrive into the ground sooner — a boon to threatened whitebark populations.

The current process to determine whether a tree might be able to withstand blister rust on its own is slow and expensive. Forest managers must collect cones from the tree, extract seeds from those cones and grow seedlings in the lab. They must wait for the seedlings to grow and then test them against blister rust, which can take as long as a decade and cost more than $1,000 per tree. The Whitebark Pine Genome Project researchers anticipate being able to get the same results in a matter of months and for only around $100 per tree.

“If you can uncover the underlying genes that determine resistance, then you can go to the forest, clip a couple of needles off, put them in a test tube, isolate the DNA and determine whether it’s a carrier of resistant genes,” Neale says.

If the project bears fruit, the result would have an enormous impact on whitebark pine, says Julee Shamhart, executive director for the nonprofit Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. By simplifying the process of identifying healthy trees for forest managers, Shamhart says, restoration “can be done more efficiently, more effectively and more often.”

In fall 2024, Neale’s graduate student, Brian Allen, started the work that will hopefully make spotting resilient trees simpler. At his lab in Davis, Calif., Allen received samples collected that summer from healthy trees in the Sierra Nevada and used detergents to break down pine seed and needle tissue to extract DNA. In early 2025, he will send whitebark pine DNA to a company that can turn this DNA into the individual sequence for each tree they’ve sampled, the first step in identifying which genes might be giving them an edge against blister rust.

Once they return the results, he’ll start looking for segments within a tree’s DNA called markers or regions. If a longer piece of DNA is like a paragraph, a marker or genetic region would be a word that makes up that paragraph. The hope is that Allen and his colleagues will be able to find markers that individually, or in combination, may make a particular tree more resilient to disease, heat or drought conditions.

For forest managers who plan to restore whitebark forests, markers like these “could help identify trees on the landscape that would be good sources for cones,” Allen says. Determining which whitebark to use as a seed source would potentially be as easy as clipping a needle and sequencing that tree’s DNA — if the results show that the tree has in-born resistance to blister rust, for example, managers could grow new seedlings knowing that they’re giving the forest the best chance to survive.

EXPANDING RESEARCH

Allen is also working with samples of whitebark pine from across the West and emphasizes that the project wouldn’t be possible without extensive collaboration. Funding comes from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, American Forests and donors like the Life Time Foundation. Samples are provided by the U.S. Forest Service, British Columbia Ministry of Forests, the University of Montana and American Forests.

“This project is only possible because it brings together and leverages preexisting resources provided by our American and Canadian partners, built through years of dedicated work,” Allen explains. “Seed samples had already been collected from across the species’ natural range, including in really remote areas, along with extensive disease resistance data, waiting to review their genetic story.”

The partnership between American Forests and the National Park Service is another joint effort that is already expanding whitebark pine research, says Zoe Klein, American Forests’ senior manager ecologist. She is working on whitebark pine within Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, an area where whitebark has been relatively understudied in part because of the remoteness and inaccessibility of the trees.

Whitebark pine in the southern Sierra also have not been heavily impacted by blister rust — yet. Klein and others say this means that this is the perfect time for American Forests and partners to ramp up their efforts.

“Our trees are healthy, but you don’t want to just assume that they’re going to be that way forever,” she says.

As part of this work, Klein is mapping out potential cone collection sites across the landscape. In 2025, she will also be working to develop a conservation strategy for the parks, as well as creating an interagency working group to bring together partners working on whitebark pine across the southern Sierra.

“It’s really cool to have my position starting right now, when our trees [in the Sierra Nevada] are really healthy, and we could develop all these systems and programs of cone collecting and conservation planning to make sure that our trees stay healthy,” she says.

MOUNTAIN LOVERS’ SUPPORT

A new partnership with the Life Time Foundation is supporting Klein and others at American Forests who are working to restore whitebark pine across the West. In May 2024, the Life Time Foundation provided a $1 million grant for whitebark pine restoration, which aligns with the foundation’s mission to support healthy people, a healthy planet and a healthy way of life. A portion of this grant is dedicated to help the Whitebark Pine Genome Project identify healthy trees on the landscape, too.

“My hope is that we can build a passionate community dedicated to raising awareness about the vital role these species play in sustaining high-mountain ecosystems and supporting biodiversity,” says Valeria La Rosa, the foundation’s program director.

Whitebark pine’s connection to high-altitude ecosystems is what has drawn many of the people working to protect it. The Life Time Foundation attracts athletes from around the world to mountain peaks to run and bike through whitebark territory in the Rocky Mountains. It is athletes and mountain lovers of all types who have driven the grassroots movement to support whitebark.

The mountain lovers championing these trees include Neale, who has hiked, climbed and skied among whitebark pine in the West, and Klein, who fell in love with the high-country during a post-college job in the Sierra Nevada national parks.

Bockino’s ties to the mountains — and whitebark — run particularly deep. She’s spent more than two decades working with whitebark pine in the Rocky Mountains alongside jobs as a ski and mountaineering guide. Now, her work in partnership with American Forests has brought her back to another of her favorite places, the Sierra Nevada. She has visited many times over the years both as a climber and to “recharge my whitebark bank account” by visiting thriving trees, a contrast to her work with populations heavily affected by blister rust in the Rockies.

“I think trees are caretakers,” Bockino says. “It’s not only that they make oxygen out of carbon dioxide. There’s just something about being around a tree where you feel cared for and safe.”

Now, she’s one of many who are returning this kind of care to ensure the whitebark pine can thrive.

Cameron Walker writes from California and is the author of the children’s book “National Monuments of the U.S.A.”