Pando: A Timeline of Curiosity and Care
Developed, collated and updated by Friends of Pando
Have an update, story to share or a correction? Please use our Contact Page | Updated May 23, 2026
- 1976: Before its discovery, Pando’s homeland is set aside for recreational use as part of the larger USFS National Forest Management Act.
- 1976: After years of work, Burton Barnes and Jerry Kemperman document the discovery of a mega-clone in the Fishlake Basin based on aerial photography and field studies. This paper will become the primary source for future papers about the tree that will later be named Pando.
- 1987: Fishlake National Forest begins research on the massive aspen clone observed by Barnes and Kemperman. Noting disease, a plan is developed to coppice parts of the tree. Coppicing is a treatment that removes diseased wood and spurs regeneration by shifting the hormone balance – in favor of new growth. To increase removal of diseased trees, Fishlake permits the public to collect downed trees and diseased wood.
- 1988: Another round of coppicing is undertaken to help promote regeneration.
- 1992: The public and researchers note that new growth spurred by coppicing is being eaten by Mule Deer. The USFS installs a three-sided wildlife control to protect new growth from herbivory by deer and elk. This protective barrier measures approximately 15 acres and is named the the “Aspen Regeneration Project”.
- 1993: The previously unnamed tree is given the nickname “Pando” by researchers Jeremy Mitton and Michael C. Grant. While they did not discover the tree, the name sticks and provides a “common name” for the Pando Aspen Clone that aids researchers finding work about the Pando Tree.
- Circa 1993-2009: Fishlake Ecologist Robert “Bob” Campbell helps spur a new generation of aspen ecology and research in the Fishlake National Forest.
- 1997: Fishlake National Forest Ecologist Robert Campbell along with Dale Barto’s – supports work by Charles Kay to undertake the first formal re-photography project about Fishlake Basin. While the survey works to re-photograph locations documented by the Powell Expedition, the effort includes a few aerial views of Fish Lake, including Pando. The document is used by Fishlake National Forest and researchers to this day to understand how the Pando’s homeland has changed over time.
- 2006: The Pando Tree receives an official US Postal Service stamp. The stamp, which is one of 40 unique designs for the “Wonders of America” created by Lonnie Busch – highlights superlative wonders in America. The stamps claims Pando is the “World’s Largest Plant” which sows confusions about it status as a tree. The stamp enters circulation on May 27, 2006.
- 2008: USFS scientist Jennifer DeWoody, working with independent researchers Karen Mock, Valerie Hipkins, and Carol Rowe publish genetic research that verifies Pando’s size and scale of operation. Pando officially becomes the world’s largest tree of any kind, being the largest tree by weight (13.2 million pounds), the largest tree by land mass (106 acres), and the largest aspen clone combined.
- 2009-2011: Fishlake National Forest Ecologist Robert Campbell works with Dale Bartos and others to support development of a framework to care for Pando.
- 2011: Forest Ecologist Robert Campbell supports efforts by independent researcher Paul C. Rogers to realize the Pando Aspen Clone Restoration Project.
- 2013: Based on results of work from the 1980’s and early 1990’s and emergent research, Fishlake National Forest begins work to install new wildlife controls to protect Pando. The effort brings 53 acres of the Pando into protective management, while inside, prescribed ground fire and removal of Juniper are used to stimulate regeneration to help restore the tree. The wildlife controls are inadequate height to halt deer and elk entering in many places, but the efforts protects nearly half of Pando from other uses.
- 2013: Fishlake National Forest names Pando a “Special Place” on its website.
- 2013: Fishlake partners with Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (aka “UDWR”) on Pando. Under federal and state law, Utah DWR has authority and dominion over wildlife and game in and around Pando.
- 2013-2019: Fishlake National Forest works informally with several conservation groups to develop insights, research, and management models to study and protect Pando.
- 2018: Via a grant agreement, Fishlake National Forest permits crews led by Western Aspen Alliance and funded by EJF Philanthropies to increase the height of wildlife controls to 8-feet – the height which mule deer and elk can readily jump over.
- 2019: Utah DWR and volunteers from around the United States, work to install deer-proof visitor gates on a trail-spur that goes through Pando joinig the Old Spanish trailhead and Lakeshore National Recreation Trail.
- 2020: Fishlake National Forest Staff takes part in community forums organized by the group the “Friends of Pando”. In a series of community calls, leaders discuss concerns about Pando and what can be done to care for it. Fishlake National Forest staff will seed the idea of a hypothetical agent, a “Pando Ambassador” who can undertake regular monitoring and maintenance work on Pando based on Aspen Ecology models and successful projects for Pando in the past.
- 2021: Friends of Pando to gather the first canopy studies of Pando’s landmass.
- 2021: Fishlake National Forest helps fund work on the Pando Photographic Survey undertaken by Friends of Pando and Snow College. A first-of-its-kind document, the effort details 8,542 locations of the tree at the ground level. The effort produces image and location data that can be replicated and used to monitor Pando for generations to come.
- 2022: Fishlake formalizes an initial, 5-year partnership with Friends of Pando who are solely dedicated to Pando’s protection and care.
- 2022: Friends of Pando and Fishlake National Forest collaborate to pilot the “Pando Ambassador” program.
- 2022: Friends of Pando, Fishlake National Forest, and Utah DWR staff collaborate on Wildlife Control repair, undertaking 141 restoration, maintenance, and fortification projects on the wildlife control. Friends of Pando crews will also record wildlife activity, undertake drone flights for mapping projects and capture recreation data to inform responsible recreation policy.
- 2022: The Fishlake Recreation Plan, which expands protection and care of Pando is approved by Fishlake Forest Supervisor Mike Elson after a NEPA review and public comment period. The plan details work to install additional permanent and temporary fencing systems to proactively protect and manage the Pando.
- 2022: Friends of Pando gathers a second canopy study of the Pando Tree.
- 2022: Working with Fishlake National Forest, Friends of Pando sponsors work by sound conservationist Jeff Rice to document the soundscape of Pando. The recordings document Pando’s subterranean workings for the first time and make global headlines.
- 2023: Utah DWR begins a longitudinal deer collaring program to better understand deer behavior in and around Pando.
- 2023: Fishlake National Forest, working with Friends of Pando, begins a longitudinal wildlife monitoring program using an array of Wildlife Cameras and Bioacoustic devices.
- 2023: Fishlake National Forest and Friends of Pando collaborate to develop the first LiDAR-based digital landmass model of Pando.
- 2023: Friends of Pando begins publishing data from the Pando Photographic Survey. The project documents 60% of Pando’s landmass via high-resolution 360-degree images, allowing anyone to study and explore the tree year-round, from anywhere in the world.
- 2023: Friends of Pando publishes data from the first season of Wildlife studies about all who call Pando home. The study continues today and represents the largest and longest-running wildlife study about Pando.
- 2023: Friends of Pando undertakes soil studies in 12 sites across Pando. While average pH levels are lower than desirable – likely due to the timing of sample gathering (August of 2023), the soil studies show promise. Data about calcium (CA) content indicates a rich mix deep in the soil profile, a critical data point, as calcium is relied on by calcium Pando for cell wall growth, while calcium also naturally repels aluminum (AL), which can be toxic to the tree.
- 2023: Friends of Pando launches the “Pando Living Map” project. The project documents all publicly available maps and collected landmass data about Pando as well as monitoring and research data collected by Friends of Pando.
- 2024: In January of 2024, the Governor of Utah, Spencer J. Cox, mentions Pando in his State of the State address. The following week, elected officials welcome Friends of Pando leaders and community partners to discuss the work needed to care for Pando.
- 2024: State Representative Carl Albrecht secures a allocation of $250,000 to bring approximately 80% of Pando’s land mass into protective care.
- 2024: Friends of Pando begins undertaking low-elevation LiDAR drone flights of Pando’s landmass for use in ground cover studies and developing canopy mix models.
- 2025: The Pando Protection Plan brings some 80% of Pando’s landmass into protective care and provides materials for enough “quick fencing” to protect 2 acres of Pando on a rotating basis.
- 2025: Friends of Pando hosts its first public “Community Forestry” Day in Pando. Volunteers from across Utah join Friends of Pando and its partners to build quick fences to protect a flourishing 0.73-acre patch of regeneration in a once-desolate part of the tree. Other crews work to beautify and restore another two acres of Pando inside the new wildlife controls, as crews have been doing going back to the 2010s.
Land Managment History
Former Forester, Fishlake National Forest
Pando and the greater Fish Lake Basin, where it is found
became part of the Forest Reserve system by presidential proclamation from William McKinley on February 10th, 1899. Pando’s history since that time has, in part, been linked to this connection to what became Fishlake National Forest. The Forest Reserve Act was signed into law in 1891 to protect forest reserves, and transitioned to National Forests around 1907. These designations in Utah were primarily established at the request of local citizens to protect watersheds, provide a sustainable timber supply, and manage grazing of domestic livestock. Grazing around Fish Lake then was a mix of sheep and cattle. Small-scale sawmills existed in the valley towns west and south of Fish Lake.
Management of the Fishlake Forest, and in turn, Pando expanded to encompass more objectives with the passage of the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960. This act of Congress broadened the mission of the Forest Service by placing timber, range, water
and wildlife on equal terms to best meet the needs of the American people. It is around this time that summer residences were built along the shore of Fish Lake and on the edge of the yet to be discovered Pando.
National Forest direction was again addressed by Congress in 1976 with the passage of the National Forest Management Act. This act directs the Forest Service to maintain viable populations of vertebrate wildlife found on their lands and to create a Land and Resource Management Plan for each Forest. These forest plans described resource management practices, prioritization of individual uses for given areas, and the suitability of lands for different resource management activities. Under the Fishlake Forest Plan, Pando falls into the management area prioritizing rural and roaded recreational opportunities. Within this designation, visual resources and providing recreational experiences are prioritized.
Coincidentally, this is the same year that Jerry Kemperman and Burton Barnes made the public and the Fishlake National Forest aware of two large clones in the Fish Lake Basin. It was an attempt to study aspen across the Western United States that the two happened to be driving along Highway 25, a highway that to this day bisects Pando. Their publication describes two large aspen clones observed during aerial observations. One clone was 24 acres and the other, later to be named Pando, was estimated to be 106 acres in size. Kemperman and Barnes used leaf, bark, and stem characteristics to determine the clone size. Tantalizingly, the authors make a passing mention to larger clones, perhaps as large as 200 acres in the region. To date, the location of this larger than Pando aspen clone is unknown.
In response to public concern, the Forest Service chose to build a six-foot fence around the fifteen-acre harvest area in the fall of 1992. Unfortunately, the window to fence and protect the two smaller cuts had passed as little regeneration in those areas persisted. Allen Henningson, a forest silviculturist during this time, reported that the sprouts were heavily browsed by deer. The fenced area did successfully regenerate and remains one of the highest concentrations of young aspen in the Pando clone.
Pando received its name in the popular press in October 1993 with the publication of Michael C. Grant’s Discover Magazine article entitled The Trembling Giant. Grant, in addition to providing the moniker, was also the first to draw attention to the clone’s large size and weight making it one of the world’s largest organisms. Grant’s efforts in publicizing the clone and a variety of articles about the clone at this time also resulted in the U.S. Postal Service issuing a Pando stamp in May of 2006 as part of a 40-stamp set entitled “Wonders of America.”
Alan Henngison Pando Images
Source: Nick Mustoe et al.
Validation for Pando’s genetic identity came in 2008 with the work of Jennifer DeWoody and others. DNA isolated from leaves and cambium confirmed an almost identical size for Pando as that proposed by Kemperman and Barnes. The genetic certainty that Pando was identical provided a crucial validation to its status as one of the world’s largest organisms. Genetic research on aspen clones remains rare to this day, perhaps another one of Pando’s notable titles as one of only a handful of wild aspen clones to have its size confirmed by DNA evidence.
In 2011, Bob Campbell – Forest Ecologist for the Fishlake National Forest – and Utah State University’s Paul Rogers worked together to bring about the Pando Clone Restoration Project with the aim to fence 67 acres of Pando and study aspen regeneration resulting from four restoration treatments. These were burning the understory of common juniper, shrub removal, and selective cutting of overstory trees to elicit growth promoter response. The Forest conducted these test treatments in 2014. Some aspen ecologists at the time believed that the Pando clone root system might already be too depleted to respond and send up new sprouts, despite prolific sprouting responses to the previous coppice cuts. There has been extensive sprouting within the fenced areas following treatment. A publication by Paul Rogers and Jody Gale in 2017 confirmed this and showed that there was no statistical difference in number of aspen sprouts resulting from any of the treatment methods and the effect of fencing alone.
Pando and the Fishlake National Forest have continued to host a variety of researchers, non-governmental organizations, and interested members of the public at Pando each year. Recreation staff with the Forest have reported a noticeable uptick in visitors making a trip to the Fish Lake Basin specifically to visit the clone. The Fishlake National Forest has developed an interpretive plan for Pando, placed “Entering the Pando Aspen Clone” signs on both ends of where Highway 25 crosses Pando, and produced an informational brochure to provide forest visitors details about the clone. In 2019, the Forest, volunteers, and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources worked together to install wildlife proof visitor gates in a fenced area adjacent to Dr Creek Campground. Camping on the edge of the Pando clone at Dr. Creek Campground remains popular with a variety of visitors to the basin. Additional fencing of Pando as well as closing a Forest Service Road through Pando are among the options for future management being considered by the Fishlake National Forest. A related master plan for managing recreation and infrastructure in the Fish Lake Basin is also in the early phases. Any changes in the management of the clone will be open to public comment and consideration.
Friends of Pando is dedicated and working to educate the public, support research and preservation efforts and inspire stewardship of Pando, the world’s largest tree.
Friends of Pando is a proud partner of Pando’s public land stewards, Fishlake National Forest of the U.S. Forest Service, Department of Agriculture. Learn more about our partnership.
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Friends of Pando
PO Box 12
Richfield, UT, 84701
Phone: 435-633-1893
IRS EIN: 87-3958681
