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Earth Notes - Pando

Michael Collier

It’s a fine Western experience to wander through a shimmering aspen grove on a sunny fall day.  But one particular grove is especially stunning.

A single stand of aspen on a hillside above Fish Lake in south-central Utah is billed as the largest living organism on the planet.  It’s called Pando, Latin for “I spread.” 

Pando covers about 105 acres and contains more than 45,000 individual aspen stems. Aspen spread by an underground root system, and DNA testing has shown that every tree in the Pando clone is genetically identical--all arose from one parent, possibly thousands of years ago.   

But foresters and researchers are concerned about Pando’s future--older trees are weak and dying and they’re not being replaced by a new generation.

Insects and disease are part of the problem, but mostly it’s deer and livestock grazing the young shoots. The Fishlake National Forest began restoration work in the 1980s to help Pando. They fenced some of the grove to keep out any grazing animals. And more recently, Grand Canyon Trust, Utah State University scientists, and others have installed additional exclosures and are monitoring the grove. Burning and cutting have also been tried, along with removing invasive plants and juniper undergrowth, to create the open, disturbed ground aspen prefer.  

Repeat photography from 2014 to 2019 has shown strong regrowth of saplings inside the fenced areas. But management will require ongoing adaptive efforts for this unique aspen grove, in a category all its own.