Climate Change in Mountains Lab

 

In the Climate Change in Mountains Lab, we study how recent climate change is impacting mountain ecosystems, primarily alpine streams of western North America. For the most part, we are ecologists but our work is highly interdisciplinary with elements of hydrology, glaciology, and geosciences interwoven. Often, our core projects use long-term, repeated data collection to separate signal from noise (e.g., interannual variation in snowpack). Since mountain areas largely fall under the management of federal agencies in the United States—National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, etc.—our research is closely integrated with these groups and we seek to co-produce and share knowledge with them whenever possible. Through these partnerships, our research has directly informed Endangered Species Act decision-making.

Current projects in the lab include:

• Tracking and quantifying the impacts of cryosphere recession on headwater streams of the Teton Range. This is the Teton Alpine Stream Research project or “TASR” (tay-zer) as we call it.
• Understanding the status and influence rock glaciers in high mountain watersheds
• Trends and drivers of ice phenology on high mountain lakes in the Intermountain West (e.g., see our recent study on Yellowstone Lake here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad3bd1). 
• The ecology and impacts of snow algae on mountain snowpack

Interested in our work?