Oregon Public Broadcasting

In the dry areas of the Northwest, much of the land is covered by a low-lying crust. You may have never noticed it but this living crust creates a sort of skin on the land. It helps hold down the soil and moisture and it adds nutrients. But these tiny species are in jeopardy. Correspondent Anna King traveled to one of the areas in the Northwest where you can still find crust: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Janelle Downs, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab, holds a small bit of crust out for inspection. Crust grows across the globe but this bit is a mix of fungus and bacteria that grows on the ground on the Hanford Reach National Monument in southcentral Washington.

Janelle Downs and Jennifer Von Reis spend a good part of their year on their stomachs amid old-growth sagebrush studying crust. They both specialize in the ecology of the dry areas of the Northwest. They tell me I have to get down on my belly to really understand this bumpy carpet of living matter.Von Reis gets down on the ground with me to show me proper crust inspection techniques. She says right now is the perfect time to study this low-lying bunch of organisms.Jennifer Von Reis: “You have to actually stick your head right in the surface of the soil like this. And then you look. What's there? Wow! It's pretty exciting.”Von Reis hands me a magnifying lens the size of a quarter and I stick my nose nearly in the dirt to look at the crust more closely.

“It looks like a hornet's nest or a paper wasp nest, all those holes in there. Are those spore holes?"

What my naked eye couldn't see was the intricacy of this tiny living forest. Moss, mixed with fungus, mingles with bacteria and algae to create a topography of "canyons" and “mountains” and “trees” under my nose. All this is more visible right now, because Eastern Washington is moist.

Jennifer Von Reis, a PhD student, lays on her belly to get an up-close gander at some biological crust at the Hanford Reach National Monument in southcentral Washington. Biological crust is in jeopardy worldwide from recreation, green energy development, grazing and agriculture

But crust is more than just cool-looking stuff under a magnifying glass. Downs says crust is the living skin of the desert. It holds down the soil. It absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. It holds water. It puts nutrients back into the ground. It wards off invasive seeds like cheat grass and Russian thistle. Downs and Von Reis study how land management actions, like spraying for noxious weeds might affect these tiny species. So far, their research finds crust is fairly resilient to periodic spraying, but it doesn't do so well say when it's stepped on. You see, to get good crust it has to grow for centuries.“Where you have lots of livestock grazing, crust like we are seeing here today, where it fills all the interplant spaces really doesn't exist anymore," said Downs. About 40 percent of the earth is covered with habitat that can support crust. But it's in trouble worldwide.

Biological soil crust grows in a thick, bubbly carpet across the Hanford Reach National Monument in southeast Washington. Crust takes hundreds of years to mature and can be crushed by a single step.

Crust covers much of the U.S., Africa and China. That's a big deal, because crust holds down dust. Downs and Von Reis know a lot about this, but they insist I talk to a woman in the southwest, who they call the “Crust Goddess.” It's Jayne Belnap who's a research ecologist for U.S. Geological Survey. She says blowing dust storms can circle the earth and speed global warming. Dust gets on glaciers and melts them more than a month earlier than normal.“It changes the albedo of the snowpack - albedo being the reflectance of that snow. So dark snow is going to melt much more quickly than light snow, because the light snow reflects most of the light off of it. The dark snow absorbs that energy and that heat, and makes it warmer and the snow melts," she said.Belnap says that problem snowballs. The dust accumulates more each year and makes the snow melt faster and faster. And she says increasing amounts of dust is being stirred up when crust is destroyed. Belnap said even green energy projects like wind and solar farms are hurting crust.“Most people don't realize that the solar panels have to be able to rotate, so they clear all the vegetation from under the panels. There's no plants under there. When you talk about a 200,000 acre solar farm you are talking about this huge impact on the landscape," she said.Other threats to crust are recreational vehicles, development and land clearing for agriculture. Back at Hanford, Janelle Downs is intimately familiar with agriculture's affects on the landscape here. She remembers her mother and father ripping out sagebrush north of Pasco to farm.“We have to weigh all of those choices very carefully. And so where we still have intact sage brush stands and intact native plant communities, I think it's critical that we consider very carefully what the future will hold for those areas," she said.Nowadays, Downs is pretty far from ripping out sagebrush. On our way back to the truck she winces with every hop-scotch step.“Walk soft," she said.It's hard to walk any other way, once you've seen up close what's under foot.