PORT ANGELES — Teams of volunteer “citizen scientists” are completing their training as part of a volunteer project to study population size and distribution of the Olympic marmot in Olympic National Park.
More than 100 people from the North Olympic Peninsula, Seattle-Tacoma area and as far away as Los Angeles signed on to become marmot monitors.
A $26,300 grant from Washington’s National Parks Fund has paid for the training and for GPS units the volunteers will use in the field.
“The marmot is an iconic species at Olympic,” said Sue Griffin, who heads the monitoring program for the park.
“More than 90 percent of the species lives within park boundaries, so we have a special responsibility to study and safeguard the animal.”
Olympic marmots are in decline in some areas in the park.
This is believed to be due to the encroachment of trees into the meadows where they live and predation by coyotes, both situations possibly related to global warming.
In 2009, legislation was signed that declared the Olympic marmot to be Washington state’s “official endemic mammal.”
Existing only on the North Olympic Peninsula, the Olympic marmot is one of the rarest species of North American marmots They are a protected species in Washington.
The species has evolved in isolation for thousands of years and differs in coloring, vocalization and genetics from the closely related hoary marmots and Vancouver Island marmots.
