Before we get into the video today, I just want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors, Gnostic TV. Gnostic TV is ancient wisdom reimagined. This is a Netflix for those who are spiritually curious and want a place to go where there is no censorship. I personally am doing a whole series on Gnostic TV called The Esoteric Explorer where I am providing exclusive content to Gnostic. Gnostic TV is a host to all sorts of different content creators, many of whom are your old favorites. If you would like to check out Gnostic TV, there is a link down in the description box below. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and boy, do I have a story for you today. This story is not a deep dive. It's not research that I've done. This is a legit story from my own personal life, something that happened about six or seven years ago, a crazy, crazy thing that happened six or seven years ago, and I finally, this weekend, feel like I might have gotten some answers as to what actually happened to me, my boyfriend, and one of our friends. Now, this story might be a story of a skinwalker. That is what we are led to believe at this moment. But I need to recap what happened for you guys to understand why we came to this conclusion. So this past weekend, my boyfriend and I went up to North Georgia to watch our friend, Jessica Jones, the cryptid huntress here on YouTube speak at a Bigfoot convention, where this convention was being held as an area in North Georgia that we frequent a lot. In fact, my boyfriend in a previous life had lands up there. And when I say previous life, I meant before he met me. He owned land in Tiger, Georgia, which is very near Clayton, Georgia. It is in the heart of Appalachia. So we're up there all the time. We love to hike. We love to go up there just to be in the woods, be one with nature, since we spend most of our time here in the city. Now, when we go hiking, we tend to go to trails or areas of the Appalachians that not many people frequent. In fact, we rarely go to the touristy spots. So where this situation happened to us happened in a very, very desolate location, which makes the story even weirder. But let's go back to this weekend. On Friday morning, March 15th, 2024, I got up super early to do my yoga practice and pack up. My boyfriend was at our local shawla, our own shawla. He was teaching a class, and once he was done, we were going to jump in his truck and head up to the mountains. Our plan was to get there a little bit early before check-in for our hotel so that we can hit some of the trails before checking in and meeting up with Jessica Jones later that afternoon. That Saturday, the next day, March 16th, I was going to go to the convention with Jessica to watch her speak. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was going to go way off trail to one of his secret locations to spend the day in the woods. We were going to meet up Saturday afternoon to all go on a hike together so my boyfriend could show Jessica some of these secret locations that he goes to. If you are new to this channel, both myself and my boyfriend are used to paranormal phenomenon. We are both magnets for the supernatural. We're both RH negative. He's seen me get attacked by spirits. He himself has also had his own UFO encounters on military bases since he grew up on military bases as a child. So for us, things in the paranormal world are not super weird. In fact, they're pretty, pretty normal. But nonetheless, on Friday morning, March 15th, I was packing up, getting all of our stuff ready to go. When he gets home from work and as I'm packing up, I am listening to these stories of weird phenomenon that happened in the Appalachian Mountains. Now many of you do know that I am doing a series on Gnostic TV over the strange, the high strangeness of the Appalachians and I'm also quite interested in the topic as well. So it's no skin off my back to listen to these stories. Well, as we were listening, I was listening, getting everything ready to go, some stories came up about people experiencing strange humans in the mountains. Now we've covered feral people on this channel before and this is not what I'm speaking of. I'm not talking about feral people. I'm talking about people that just randomly appear in the Appalachian Mountains and they don't look like they belong there. For example, in this one story, this guy talked about his girlfriend and him were out hiking in the Appalachian Mountains, on the Appalachian Trail and all of a sudden they ran across a younger girl who was in the depth of the mountain in a sundress and a headlamp. So she had this one item, this headlamp that indicated she was hiking but she was not dressed for the trail. You don't wear a sundress when you're hiking in the Appalachians. Well, they said something to her in passing and she responded very oddly and so the boyfriend decided that he was going to follow her for a little bit and so he followed her down the trail and as he followed the strange girl he saw her shapeshift into a skin walker. He ran back to his girlfriend and they got in the car and they left immediately. Well, as I'm listening to the story, I run into the front room and I tell my boyfriend to listen to it because we had the same experience. Let's get back to the timeline though. So we recognize that after we listen to this TikTok that we've also had the same experience and not only that, but we go on to realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people having the same experience that we had had six to seven years prior. Well, Friday progresses, we get into the car to head up to Clayton, Georgia, where this conference is and we decide to listen to a series on the Ashley Madison fiasco. Totally kind of forgetting about the whole skin walker story and our own experiences. Again, paranormal phenomenon is nothing new to us so we just kind of laughed it off like, well, we must have experienced a skin walker and we go about our day. We get up to Clayton, Georgia and it's raining outside so we can't hit the trails yet. So we go, we get some lunch and we're finally able to check into our hotel. We check into our hotel, we drop our bags off and by this time it's like two, two 30 in the afternoon.  So we go and we do part of the Bertram Trail. We were gone for like an hour. We come back, Jessica gets in, she's staying at the same hotel as us.  Well, Jessica, AKA the Cryptocountress here on YouTube, her channel will be tagged down below. She hits it off with my boyfriend right away. I mean, we met on Zoom. We just had not met in person. So we're all sitting in our hotel room and we're starting to talk about crazy stories. Of course, Jessica is a Bigfoot locator. She does field research into Bigfoot. So she's sharing some of her stuff that she never shared on camera with us in our hotel room and we're just hitting it off, talking about all these experiences, that paranormal experiences that we have had. And I mentioned something about the fact that we had heard a TikTok this morning about this phenomenon of people seeing random people and the appellations, not feral people, but people that look like they come from a city and they'll have like one item on them that signifies that they are hiking, but they won't be dressed appropriately for the trails. And I said that in this TikTok, it seemed that this was an actual skin walker, a shape shifter. And so I proceed to tell Jessica the story of what happened to us, myself, my boyfriend and our friend, Josh McKay, who does my opening music here on this channel, the story that happened like six or seven years ago. Now, my friends, this was long before I even thought about having a YouTube channel. So let me back up about what happened to us, okay? So as I said, we like to go up there and we like to go on trails that are not populated by many people. And in fact, this one particular trail that we do a lot where this phenomenon happened is way off the beaten path. We like this trail because the end of the trail ends at one of the rivers here in Georgia and there's usually like a beach front so we can hike down to the river. In the summertime especially, we can pack a bag, we can bring towels, we can bring food, we can just kind of spend the day at the river and then hike back up once the sun starts to set and leave. Now again, this is not a trail that's frequented by many, many people. And in fact, to get to this trail is quite a trek.  Once the gravel road ends, you turn onto a dirt road and this dirt road is rough terrain. My car wouldn't make it, Josh's car won't make it. So normally when Josh meets us up there, he meets us at the church, gets to my boyfriend's truck with us before we get to the trail. It takes a while, again, the terrain is really, really rough and as you're going down the gravel road before you get to the dirt road, you start to see less and less and less housing. By the time you get to the dirt road, there are no houses anywhere. In fact, we have never seen anybody else back there.  The road and the terrain are so rough that you can only really go about five to 10 miles an hour max, just to get over all the puddles and all the terrain. And in fact, many times we've had to actually stop the car and go and move stuff off the road in order to keep going. This is not a trail that you could just walk to, right? You have to drive there. If you were to walk to the trail, that would be a hike in itself.  Now the trail itself leading down to the river is a hard trail. It's not something that an amateur hiker is going to do. It's not something that someone who is elderly or out of shape is going to do.  It's not a place where you could just leave somebody who's injured, climb up the mountain, drive off and get help to come back because it's gonna take you a long time to get back up the mountain. It's gonna take even more time to get the car out of the terrain onto the main road to find help. And you definitely, definitely do not want to leave somebody on that trail overnight because where this trail is, there are no city lights. You don't have cell phone reception. Once the sun goes down, it is pitch black dark.   So this is not, this is not a trail that beginner hikers are gonna wanna take. Again, it's not in a populated area. It's not, there's no park rangers. It's literally the only people who know about this particular trail are locals. And as I've said, we've been doing this trail for almost 10 years now. And never have I ever seen anybody else on this trail. It's always just been us, just us using this trail. Now, once you get to the river, you'll see kayakers and whitewater rafters will go by their drop point is way down the river and you can just kind of wave to them. The other side of the river is technically South Carolina. And so across the river, there are no beaches. It is a steep cut into a mountain. So there's no one ever on the other side. It is just you on the Georgia side. So this one day about six or seven years ago as I'm telling Jessica this story about six or seven years ago, my boyfriend, myself and our friend, Josh McKay. Again, the guy who does the music for this channel decide that we're going to take a day trip up to this particular spot in the mountains. We've done this many, many, many times. We agreed to meet Josh. He doesn't live in Atlanta. He lives in Athens, Georgia. So we meet at the church, this little church that's right on the road. You turn off before you get to the gravel road and then get to the dirt road. So we meet at the church so Josh can park his car. His car is not gonna make it. It's a city car, just like my car. So it's not gonna make it down the terrain. So Josh gets into the truck with my boyfriend and myself and we start our trip into the mountains. We finally get to the head of the mountain. We unload the car. We put our backpacks on. We've got our towels in our backpack. We're gonna spend a day at the river. We've got food. We've got bathing suits. We've got a little curtain to hang up over a branch so we can change. And we go, we head down, down the mountain to the river. We spend the whole day on the river laughing, having a great time, swimming. You know, I want to make something clear. Even though we ourselves are people who will drink every now and again, socially, we never drink at this river location for all the reasons that I explained earlier. When we're done, when the sun starts to set and we know we need to beat the sun out of the mountains because once the sun sets, it's pitch black dark, we know we have to go up a huge mountain to get back to the car. And then we've got to drive the car over rough terrain to get back into the city. So we never drink. We never do anything that would disorient us while we're on the river. It's just typical food, typical water bottles, all that kind of stuff where we're swimming and we're just having a great time out on the river. Again, our cell phones don't even work. You don't get the reception. So it starts to become dust. So we pack our bags up and we head back up the mountain to get to our car. We have to climb up literally some places of this trail are so steep. You're literally climbing to get up to the top of the mountain back to the trailhead. By the time you get up to the part where it's flat to get to the trailhead where our car is parked, you're usually pretty gross, pretty sweaty. We had been swimming. We are a mess. But by the time you get up the top part of the mountain, you're just relieved that the hard part is over and you've only got a mile before you get to your car and you can leave. So we're walking and we're laughing and we're talking about it. And all of a sudden, up ahead comes this woman. This woman starts to walk towards us. Now, this was so strange, this interaction we had with this woman that we have spoken about it many times since. Laughed about how weird it was. That was super weird. My boyfriend and I will talk about it when we see Josh. He'll mention it from time to time. That was really weird. Like, where did that woman come from? Now, what we neglected to explain to each other was what the woman looked like. And so, this was what was so weird. Friday night, as I was recapping this story to Jessica and telling her how we heard these TikToks and people having the exact same experience we had, I started to explain what the woman looked like. And in the past six or seven years, we've never asked each other. My boyfriend's never asked me what she looked like. Josh has never asked us what she looked like. We just all assumed that we were seeing the same woman. We all agree that she was barefoot and we all agree that she had a walking stick. But what I saw was an elderly woman. I saw a woman who was probably in her late 50s, early 60s, maybe even closer to mid 60s, a woman who was closer to my mother's age. Again, she was not a feral person. She was not a mountain person. She actually looked like a Sunday school teacher. She was dressed in an outfit that you would wear to church or to teach a kindergarten class. Her hair was cut in kind of the middle-aged, helmet, Karen-esque haircut and she had makeup on. She was not fat but not thin. She just kind of had that more matronly body. Like she didn't have boobs, she had bosoms. You know what I'm saying? Like she looked like she could have been my mother or a friend of mine's mother and she had a walking stick. Now as in she was barefoot. Now this is strange too. Now we know that feral people run barefoot but again, this was not a feral person.  She looked like someone that could be your Sunday school teacher but she was barefoot. And that's something that all three of us noticed right away because you just don't go barefoot in Appalachia. I mean, I have scratches all over my legs just from a hike we took on Saturday. You're walking through sticker bushes, especially on trails like this particular trail that isn't taken by many people. You are walking through rough terrain. You always want to have shoes on. We've also gotten the issue with poisonous snakes. You want to make sure our wasp nest. You're not stepping on something that could sting you. You want to make sure that your foot is protected. So it was very strange that she did not have shoes on especially as someone who doesn't look like they're from these parts of Appalachia. So she's walking towards us. We all say hello. She doesn't even acknowledge us. She just stares right ahead and keeps on walking. And if we had not moved, she would have tried to walk through us. We all turn, all three of us turn to watch her because it was such a weird interaction. And we watch her as she keeps walking into the woods. Now, where this trail goes to the river, it goes and then it turns and goes down the mountain to the river. She walked past the turn and kept going into the woods, off trail, totally off trail. Now, we all kind of watched her for a moment and thought, well, that's strange. And we just kind of shrugged, turned around and kept walking to the car. Well, once we got to the car, we realized there were no other cars around. Where did this woman come from? There's no way, again, I'm telling you, there is no way she walked there from the main road, especially barefoot. If she had walked from the main road barefoot, she would have been a hot mess by the time she passed us on the trail. She would have been sweaty. She would have been gross. She would have had mud on her. She had none of that.  So we get into the car and we're like, that was really, really weird. And we turn around and we start heading back to civilization, basically. And we just kind of brushed it off. Like maybe there's a house close by. We just haven't noticed. There has to be a logical reason as to why this woman who ignored us, didn't even acknowledge we were there, was walking through the woods in Sunday school clothes, barefoot with a walking stick, and then passed the trail and walked even further into the woods off trail. Like there has to be a, she seemed to know where she was going. So obviously she's fine. It was just very, very strange. So all these years go by. And again, occasionally we'll bring it up. Like that was really weird. Like I remember it like it was yesterday. It was so freaking strange. And the fact that she made no eye contact with us and just really just pretended like we weren't even there. It was just a very weird thing. Well remember, as I recently said, we didn't compare notes about what she looked like. We just said she was barefoot. We all saw her barefoot and with the walking stick. We all acknowledged that she was not dressed as somebody who would be hiking. You're not gonna wear your best clothes, hiking and Appalachia.  Like I have a whole drawer full of clothes that I wear to Appalachia because I don't care. These are clothes I don't care if they get ripped or dirty because that's gonna happen, especially when you're going on trails that are not monitored by a park where there's no park rangers and they're not frequented like by many people. As I'm retelling this story to Jessica, comparing it to the TikToks we had heard earlier that day, I mentioned that she was an older woman. My boyfriend looks at me and he goes, no, she wasn't. And I looked at my boyfriend and I said, yeah, she was. She looked like she was my mother's age. He goes, no, she was like 20. And I looked at him and I said, no, she had gray hair. She gray styled hair and he goes, no, she was really young. And I said, well, she had a Sunday school outfit on, like a top and a bottom that looked like a Sunday school teacher. He goes, no, it was a sundress. Like what a 20-year-old would wear. And I said, well, she was like pleasantly plump. She wasn't skinny, but she wasn't fat, but she was thick. And he goes, no, she was really skinny and her hair was pulled in the ponytail and swear to God, she was like 20 years old. So we're looking at each other in the hotel on Friday, all of a sudden I can feel the color draining from my face. We were both realizing that this entity, this being that we saw, we saw two totally different people. I saw an older woman that was around my mother's age. He saw a young girl who was almost like a child in a sundress. The only thing we had compared were the fact that she didn't have shoes on and had a hiking stick. Well, Jessica then informs us that this is normal. When these beings show themselves, they usually show themselves in different forms to different people. It's just, we had never thought all this time, my boyfriend thought that I saw a young girl and all this time I thought that he had seen an older woman. After Jessica left that night, we decided to try to call Josh. Now, we had very poor cell phone reception so we could not get through to him, but we left a message to see what he saw. Who did he see? What did this person look like to him? We know he remembers cause we bring it up all the time about how strange it was. And this just confirmed to us more that what we saw was a shape-shifting skin walker, just like all the other stories from TikTok. The only thing is we didn't follow it.  We watched it walk off trail deep into the woods, but we never followed it. Instead, we turned around and went back to our car. If we had followed it, just like all these other stories on TikTok, we probably would have seen it shape-shift into a skin walker and who knows if we would even be alive today to tell the story. After recapping all of this to Jessica and figuring out that we had, after all these years had seen two totally different beings, I absolutely know that's what that was. There was no car, there was no car there that a normal person would have driven a car there. There was no signs of anybody being at the trailhead but us.  And one time Josh opened up his driver's side door and rocks had been stacked on his driver's seat. There was a time I went down there and the same thing had happened. There was a formation of rocks at the bottom of the trail where it was obvious people had not been down there in a really long time. I don't believe that we were being stalked by a skin walker. I think that if we were being stalked by a skin walker, we would have felt differently about this odd encounter. I also think we would have had more than one or two experiences with weird phenomenon if we were being stalked by one. I just think we happened to cross one's path. And I think that this skin walker recognized us as people who can see beyond the veil. And so the skin walker did what it could to shift into a human being or what we perceive to be a human being so we wouldn't question it. So we wouldn't follow it. But just like most entities from different dimensions, it did not realize that it needed to have shoes on nor did it realize it needed to have appropriate clothes on for us not to think it was strange. I'm not afraid to go back to this trail. Again, this happened six or seven years ago and we've been back to that trail many, many hundreds of times since and had wonderful, fantastic days on the beach down there. And I will do it again in a heartbeat. I just know now that if I pass a strange person in the woods that maybe only has one article with them that signifies hiking but otherwise dressed as if they are from the city, not to question it just to let it keep going. Cause it's no doubt in my mind that these paranormal creatures do exist and they do live out in the Appalachian mountains. They say that curiosity killed the cat and I myself do know that I will never be following a stranger human or otherwise into the woods. That Saturday, the convention went well and then that Saturday evening, Jessica myself, my boyfriend, Jessica's son and our dog went to one of my boyfriend's locations off trail. We hiked deep into Appalachia, way off the beaten path. And as we were coming back, trying to get back to the car before sunset, I had a voice in my head say, if the mountain wants you to stay, you're not getting off this mountain. Now I kept this voice to myself. I didn't say anything to Todd or Jessica as we were leaving cause I didn't want to manifest it. Definitely wanted to get off of the mountains by the time the sun set so we could be back to civilization. And once we were off, I did text that to Jessica. I was like, it felt like something was warning me like you don't want to be in certain areas of this woods because if you get too deep into the woods, the mountains not gonna let you leave. Now again, I'm not afraid to go back to the trail that we were on where we saw the skin walker but I do feel like us hearing that story, realizing what had happened all those years earlier and then having that voice in my head the next day was definitely a warning that there are certain boundaries to where we go in this vast mountain range of Appalachia. And I know that man versus nature, nature always wins. So I will be respectful of my boundaries and just stay on the trails that I know I could stay on. All right you guys, let me know down in the comment section below if you have had any weird stuff happen to you in the woods whether in Appalachia or the Rockies or the Pyrenees, wherever you are in the world, let me know if you've had some weird situations like that happen. It's eerie when you realize like this, I mean, obviously six to seven years later I still remember this like it was yesterday I could draw all this woman that we saw. And so I'm curious to hear your stories. We've got so much to talk about this week. Jessica is coming back on the channel so we can recap some of the Bigfoot convention and talk about cryptids. We've got so many chose plans for you guys. This is my favorite thing to talk about is paranormal phenomenon. So I cannot wait to go deeper into some of these stories with you all. All right you guys, I hope you're having a wonderful day and I will talk to you soon.


Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us today while we explore science and why science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life. Today I have in the studio with me Dr. Leland Worden. Welcome Leland. Thank you. Good to have you here. Leland is a postdoctoral fellow at Lyon Arboretum, part of the University of Hawaii at Manawa and he is a restoration ecologist I guess is sort of your title. So tell us what a restoration ecologist does. Yeah so restoration ecology is a really enormous field but the concept is that you're coming in and basically restoring an ecosystem that has been damaged, degraded or destroyed. So the idea is to try to bring back function that can be species or also just ecosystem services of that ecosystem. And specifically I work on tropical forest restoration in both wet and dry forests. Great I mean that's got to be challenging because the more the more we learn about ecosystems the more we realize these are incredibly complex systems with thousands on thousands of interacting parts some of which are absolutely crucial to the functioning of other parts right? Yeah absolutely so it's it's basically just trying to put all these pieces together and one of the really cool things about restoration is that there's so many steps involved that you really have to take a holistic approach where you understand so how a seed germinates and whether or not that species is suitable for the soil type and there's a lot of things but it's true it's a it's very complex and but really fun to work in because you get to do a lot of different things. True and it must be a real time element too because when you're restoring a particular trees and things you can't bring in adult trees you do have to bring in the seeds or seedlings and start start with them and know that it's still going to be decades before you've really restored that ecosystem right? Right yeah and it can be much faster in certain systems but yes in forests it's we'd like to think in terms of decades and centuries rather than just a couple years yeah. And you've been you've said you did your graduate work in Minnesota? Yeah the University of Minnesota in cities. Excellent but you were at that point working down in Costa Rica a lot? Yeah so I specifically for my doctorate worked on restoring tropical dry forests in northwestern Costa Rica and this pretty incredible conservation area called the Ariade Conservacion Guanacaste. I think we have an image right? Yeah so the first slide shows in northwestern Costa Rica basically the green segment is the protected area and I worked in kind of the north or in southwestern corner of that this little anvil in the corner called Horizonte which is the experimental forest. What's really incredible about this system is that about 80% of the forest has naturally regenerated after just removing some pressures such as unnatural grazers as cows and that actually restricting non just naturally occurring fires. But there are areas about 20% of this protected area that really needs to take an active restoration approach by planting trees because of soil degradation and other things. So that was what I focused on specifically. Excellent now a lot of people when they think of tropical forests they think of rainforests because that's sort of that sort of the image we all got from movies and books and all of these heavily green monstrous canopies dripping moisture down on us. But there are tropical dry forests. Yeah so dry forests is this really incredible ecosystem it's also almost 50% of all tropical forests or dry forests globally. So in a tropical dry forest half of the year typically although it's a range of kind of six to eight months is completely dry so no rain whatsoever and then that results in there being a lot of deciduous species generally although there's a whole range of dry forests too. But it's very different like in the wet season it can actually look really very similar to a wet forest but sometimes in the dry season especially where I work it looks like a desert. So also in Hawaii there's quite a few dry forests but people typically you're right don't think about the fact that this is a really critically important ecosystem. Right and it's important because these these are part you know the ecosystems don't exist in isolation right they're all connected to the ecosystems next to them and all and so everything that's happening in one is impacting the other either species are flowing out or species are flowing in right. Absolutely. It's a very it's a very systemic sort of approach you have to be taking. Yeah and especially on in there can be a wide range of ecosystems that really exist in such a very small land area so especially on the Hawaiian islands you can go from dry forests right on the coast and then up to the mountains it becomes much wetter where I work there's four meters of rain a year but down at Waikiki there's about half a meter so all those ecosystems are very connected and sometimes can occur just in that tiny little area so it's good to think about how they interface. Right and these days there's I mean there's a ton of pressures on these ecosystems right I mean not only there's pressures from urban growth and all but there are as you point out grazers agricultural pressures on them there are people cutting them down and plus then it's sort of the big overarching one right of changing climates right. Yeah yeah so where I work a lot of that basically the pressures were agriculture and the reason that we're able to restore on a large scale there is because a lot of the production of agriculture products which was mostly beef has actually moved over to China so that is a success story in the fact that we're able to now restore that land but there are a lot of places even think about prairies in the Midwestern United States that have this tiny little area now because of agricultural pressures but we don't really have the ability just because of human land use to restore those systems but it's good to just think about wherever we possibly can to try to reforest or bring back ecosystems that did persist in the past if that land is available if humans aren't actually using it. Right there's a there's an increasing recognition I think of what are sometimes called ecosystem services right and a recognition that these wild places on earth are actually providing things that we actually value besides just sort of peaceful serene pretty environment right where they're actually giving us potentially all kinds of valuable products. Yeah and there can be in a lot of times we can just think about decreasing runoff and thinking about water filtration but even in natural forests you can think about actually harvesting of products, forest products such as like harvesting of wood and there's a lot of ways that we can actually sustainably use ecosystems rather than just completely replacing them with for agricultural or other uses even though that is absolutely necessary to sustain our really incredibly skyrocketing global population but there are some ways such as agroforestry where we can actually think about transitioning systems that we're purely agricultural over to hybrids where we do have forest products and ag as well. Right right and particularly on small islands this this sort of mix of uses becomes really critical because it's just not not that much land right? Yeah whereas in Costa Rica where you're working it was essentially a continental jail right? Right you have a lot more space even though it's a very still kind of like post-it stamps size country it's you have a lot more space to actually do this kind of work. Right right so um so you're working there so what really brought you here and what are you going to be trying to do here in Hawaii? Yeah so um I started working about a year ago with the new director of lion arboretums Aksahawi and he works primarily in Costa Rica so I continued on my work there and then work with him in wet forests now but I'm actually starting up some new projects collaborating with the Hawaiian Replant Program at Lion Arboretum where I'm going to be looking at the outcomes of rare and endangered or threatened and endangered Hawaiian plant reintroductions so kind of leveraging my expertise and understanding of swell science and how plants respond to stress to try to really get at successes and failures and reintroductions and try to help get an idea of basically all of the outcomes that have occurred and then also try to help to make some recommendations to improve those reintroductions. Excellent because I understand you know there's a lot of a lot of variables in this the mountains here in Oahu which are have a lot of invasive species in them now and it's estimated if we could restore those who something like the original or quasi-original ecosystem we would get a tremendous amount less runoff from that forest tremendous amount more water or soaking in and we'd be essentially replenishing our aquifers at a much higher rate than right? Yeah especially because a lot of the invasive tree species here such as strawberry guava are really short-statured and you don't actually have that structure that you would as in you from a really a native Hawaiian wet forest so there's a lot to think about in terms of scoring on a really large scale. The plant reintroduction world is actually usually a much smaller scale and a lot of it is just trying to preserve the genetic material and all the really incredible native species that we have here in Hawaii. So I'm working more on a really kind of almost individual plant scale or even population scale but then the goal would be to use those general principles to then scale up which is always the goal to do landscape scale restoration and that kind of mess in with a lot of these really large scale global initiatives that have been developed recently to restore millions of hectares of forests and other ecosystems. Right but so a lot of it is a lion you'll take and set up a small plot somewhere and start trying to encourage the growth of some particular species that is extremely rare and getting more of them around so you can then start taking them out and planting them elsewhere and get multiple populations going right? Yeah and they're also just to look at all of the incredible work that's been done on the whole archipelago because people have been introducing reintroducing endangered species for many years now and they've had some really great successes and some challenges too so really just synthesizing all the information which people have been working on to try to actually think about general principles for doing those reintroductions is really great. That's great it hadn't occurred to me that yeah if people have been doing this it would be great to synthesize that knowledge because they're they're should be able to learn from the mistakes of others right and those successes right. Yeah excellent excellent that's and this certainly Hawaii well we may be one of the hot spots for invasive species that's at war but you said in Costa Rica but there are other places around the world right where the same kind of thing and not just the tropics up in the temperate zones too right? Yeah I actually started my work in science actually on understanding how an understory invasive species was impacting forest growth so there's a species called garlic mustard that is really just a pretty small ground covered species that actually become and really modify nutrient cycling so invasive species are a problem globally and it they can really impact lots of different lots of different systems aquatic systems are massively impacted by invasive species too. Sure I grew up in Florida and there were the water hyacinths which were introduced for whatever reason and gradually took over many bodies who are there and then the famous one in Florida of course is a kudzu right that was brought in in the 1930s as cattle feed and has turned into sort of a green blanket over much of the state. I mean in case like that is there are there people trying to deal though those that level of devastation to a natural ecosystem and if so what are they doing sort of sort of you know taking everything out and denoting it all? Yeah so I kind of work peripherally on invasive species but I can comment just generally so I I think there's a lot of removal programs and that has worked really well in certain cases but a lot of systems in I know of recent work in Hawaii where people are actually thinking about how to plant native species that actually persist well with those invasive so sometimes it's actually we need to recognize that we have novel ecosystems or systems that we can't just kind of notch back to exactly what they used to be before and just recognize that we can actually design systems that will bring back some of this native diversity but we may not be able to just totally take out all of the invasive stuff. Yeah well that's great and very timely so speaking of turning back the clock we are going to have to take a quick break here. Leland Worden, Lion Arboretum is with me here today. I'm your host Ethan Allen on Likeable Science. We'll take a one minute break and then we'll see you then. Aloha I'm Cynthia Sinclair and I'm Tim Appachella. We are hosts here at Think Tech Hawaii a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii non-profit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week Mondays at 3 we explore a variety of topics in our city state, nation and world and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show we welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics.  So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Welcome back to Likeable Science here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today in the ThinkTech Studio is Dr. Leland Worden from the Lion Arboretum and Leland and I were talking in the first half of the show about some of the work he's done, some issues in forest tropical dry forest restoration and all and we actually mentioned earlier that a lot of people don't particularly understand what sort of tropical dry forest is and what it looks like and I remember that you you had sent me some good photos. So we can go to the next slide here. So basically this is one of my field sites. This is a very degraded soil type called a vertisol and this is the forest that we actually sat to restore and this is about 20 years of regrowth here so you can see that there's really not much there. Right it doesn't look like a forest. Yeah so basically our idea was to try to first of all decide what species can really grow here because we don't really have a good reference ecosystem and another challenge you can go to the next slide here is that these soils flood a lot in the wet season so we have this really shrink and swall cycle of this really high clay content soil where they crack when it's dry and then flood when it's wet so this is another thing we really were trying to understand is how to pick species for this like challenging environment. Yeah yeah because as you say you can't turn the clock back so you've got to deal with the ongoing changes yeah and that must you don't know if species A really is going to go with species B right. Exactly yeah yeah so we've set out and actually started with 40 species which of about 160 species in this ecosystem tree species total is a lot. Actually we can go to the next slide here and basically planted them all out in a nursery and then tried to pick the best species out of 32 that could persist. So what do you say best what do you mean best? So specifically we're looking at survivorship survival and growth so whether or not because this is a pretty short time period that we're working with I'm over a PhD you have a limited time so I'm still monitoring this experiment but over two years what had the highest growth and what actually survived. Okay because all those were sort of native species so it was just sort of something sounds absolutely just you know hey let's let's go with whatever is going good right yeah and we tried a little bit with actually adding things to the soil to increase drainage and that in the end helped for initial survival but didn't really do anything in the long term so we found that it's really the species identity that's the most important thing. Yeah great so that's going on and and you figured this will the work you started these trees now are growing up and have turned from those little six inch one foot things into they're getting they're getting bigger yeah we have so we took that kind of the ideas from that initial experiment and then planted out six fill hectares which is about 17 acres each one of them approximately football field by a football field so to try to then answer some more management style questions on what we can we do with existing vegetation so we do have trees that are about three meters tall at this point so I'm actually going back in a month do a full survey of all the about 4500 that we planted in that experiment so I'll see I have to give an update on how tall they are at that point yeah excellent excellent yeah it is something a lot of people don't get to appreciate is to watch a tree really grow over years and years and years right yeah yeah and yeah it's it is exciting so uh and you're going to sort of take this same approach on a modified in a modified way into your work here but do we have another slide or two of your Costa Rica work do I see yeah so if we go to the next slide and the next two actually I just wanted to highlight the fact that all this work is done in collaboration with restoration practitioners so we really try to use do all of our work working with people that do this stuff on the ground so science doesn't exist in a total vacuum we really need to think about how to apply our questions on a large scale so these are images of all the people that helped me plant out but also just helped me plant all of or design all the experiments so we worked totally completely together working to think about initial questions through the final outcomes and developing our best practices right those images don't look like what people think about as doing science right yeah but people had had you collaboratively you would stand there with them and figure out what do they need here what's likely to grow here what would you like to see grow but we know probably isn't going to grow well here exactly and made all those calculations and you start digging in the dirt right lots of digging holes and then I mean watching plants grow but the digging holes takes a lot of time yeah and and it's uh it's a necessary part that's the way science proceeds right is just uh one experimenter time one little one little day in that case sort of one one seedling planted at a time exactly and excellent excellent so looking a little bit forward what do you see as some of the big challenges in ecosystem restoration are you hopeful for the field I mean do you think it seems to me there's a lot of ecosystems being degraded very rapidly and at this point in time and we're in a bit of a sort of a race as it were yeah so as much of as the challenges still really do exist there have been these really incredible global scale restoration projects started with the bond challenge developed by United Nations to basically get countries to pledge to restore millions of hectares of forest by 2030 and at this point many of these countries have already actually restored lots of forests so it's happening it's really and actually I'll highlight Brazil is a real success story where they've actually developed kind of changed their economy over a bit to have restoration be very important in terms of getting carbon credits but then also they have the infrastructure for people just being able to buy seedlings so they have really large-scale production nurseries that allow this to be pushed forward so we have to actually think about within our current both political and economic climate how to make these things happen and when countries really commit to doing this work it it happens so we need to actually think about talking to the people that really think about policy the most because to do things on a large scale you really have to work at that level right it has to really then take into account the sort of cultural norms social norms economic issues development because they can't country can't turn over a bunch of land if they're gonna something they have a bunch of people moving into that land right yeah so the people are honestly the most important so I care a lot about plants and I think about plants all the time and would love to just go and walk in a forest all day but in the end you really need to think about how doing restoration impacts people and how it benefits people and really pitching it in that way is kind of the way that my work is headed yeah yeah I mean more and more it seems this sort of idea that people have of the sort of pristine ecosystems untouched by human beings is sort of a myth like this one I mean virtually I don't want to say virtually every but huge amounts of the terrestrial landscape have been impacted in some way or another by human activity right yeah and there are relatively few spots that you could truly call pristine and untouched now yeah and humans have been impacting ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years so it's it's better to really think about that component as being just part of how the world works how we can work with the ecosystems make them a little part of our economic well-being right so that you don't just burn them down they're gone you could say it's our best economic interest to have a sustained forest going here that's going to allow us to sell the agricultural products from it or bring the tourists in to see it or capture co2 to mitigate climate change exactly yeah exactly so it's a very uh it's a truly multidisciplinary approach that you're having to take right yeah as you point out earlier you're collaborating with the actual practitioners on the ground but at the same time you have to be talking to as you said policy makers the you know the economists probably literally uh and you know the developers the urban planners all these people right have have a finger in the pot yeah and that's honestly the hardest part is actually connecting my science with policy and i've i think about this a lot and i'm trying to do more of that kind of work and a lot of people are but it's really difficult to actually just saw a really great talk by dr robin chaston where she was really saying it's hard to get a seat at the table so it's really hard to integrate real um on the ground science with what policy is getting implemented but there's a lot of venues that and nonprofits that are working on on making that happen now yeah it's it's necessary on i think far beyond actually the realm of ecosystem restoration to have have policies governmental policies based on science and scientific evidence uh it's sort of foolish and foolhardy not to do so uh one can get in big trouble by ignoring the science and the science typically while it's not in any sense a silver bullet or a panacea it's a incredibly vital part of the information right you know and your ecosystem rest restoration is probably one of the clearest examples of that you can't do that work without a good scientific knowledge of what could possibly work what is working right yeah and like you said just the knowledge of what is happening in terms of human use of all those systems and i've um have talked with farmers about trying to actually plant trees on their land and there's a whole other host of concerns in terms of taking away economic viability and turning that to restoration so they're we really need to think about um doing things like agroforestry where we can plant some agroholder products with trees and do kind of hybrid hybrid ecosystem work at this point to make sure that everyone gets what they need yeah right yeah and that's of course actually you're in a wonderful area of the world for seeing agroforestry because a lot of the small islands in particular are have to do that by they're pushed into it so the marshals where they're just these tiny little sandbars basically yeah they're growing everything you know together with the trees and the yeah the root crops and everything all uh jowl as it were yeah there's really amazing work that's that has continued on on the Hawaiian islands working with agroforestry stuff yeah it's truly wonderful stuff and it's great to see enthusiastic articulate intelligent people like yourself doing this kind of work and much needed um so I guess do you have a 10 seconds of advice for students coming up uh yeah I guess I find what you love I mean the most important thing honestly is just knowing what you don't like to do and then at that point um it's finding something that you're passionate about is really the most important and there's benefits and drawbacks to everything but I have found a part where most of the time and most of my day I'm very happy about what I'm doing and I get to be outside and it's a challenge constantly but tinkering and answering questions about natural systems is super fun cool well we thank you for coming on and sharing all your knowledge here and thank you for what you're doing doing to the planet here uh Leland Weirton uh Lion Lion Arboretum has been with us today here on likeable science I'm your host Ethan Allen we hope you'll come back next week and uh here again until then