Climate Change Impacts
Climate Change Impacts
Science plays an essential role in helping communities and resource managers understand the implications of climate change, anticipate the effects of change, and prepare for projected changes. GECSC scientists conduct research critical to understanding the physical, chemical, and biological components of the Earth system, the causes and consequences of natural and anthropogenic climate change, and the vulnerability and resilience of the Earth system to such changes.
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Mountain Pine Beetle Impacts on Carbon Cycling
In the Southern Rocky Mountains, an epidemic outbreak of mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae; MPB) has caused forest mortality on a scale unprecedented in recorded history. The impacts of insect-induced mortality have only recently received attention, although other disturbances such as fires and land-use change have a strong influence on carbon sequestration and can result in a net...
Paleohydrology of Desert Wetlands
Springs and wetlands are among the most highly threatened ecosystems on Earth. Although geographically limited, they support more than 20% of all the threatened and endangered species in the United States. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey are examining the rock record to determine how springs and wetlands responded to abrupt climate change during prehistoric times and the recent geologic...
Sources, compositions, and effects of atmospheric dust from American Drylands
The Drylands Project undertakes studies to measure past and ongoing changes in dust sources, flux, and composition in the American West, and strives to understand the effects of atmospheric dust on pressing national and global issues of snowmelt acceleration, air quality, and human health. The project develops the capability to forecast future dust emission/deposition and effects on the basis of...
Sustainable Landscapes
Evidence of the loss and fragmentation of forest, wetland, shrubland, grassland and other natural and semi-natural cover to human activities is pervasive. In response, this study focuses on the trajectory of land use and development coupled with the capacity for landscape conservation and recovery of natural and semi-natural land cover across a diversity of U.S. landscapes.
Terrestrial Rates and Amplitudes of Changes in Ecoclimate Systems (TRACES)
Vegetation changes caused by climatic variations and/or land use may have large impacts on forests, agriculture, rangelands, natural ecosystems, and endangered species. Climate modeling studies indicate that vegetation cover, in turn, has a strong influence on regional climates, and this must be better understood before models can estimate future environmental conditions. To address these issues...
Terrestrial Records of Holocene Climate Change: Fire, climate and humans
Large wildfires have raged across the western Americas in the past decade including the Las Conchas, New Mexico fire that burned 44,000 acres in a single day in 2011 (Orem and Pelletier, 2015, Geomorphology 232: 224-238, and references therein), the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta fire that required evacuating an entire city, and the 2015 Alaskan fire season that burned more than 5 million acres...