Upland Vegetation and Soils

Across the US, changes in water availability are altering which plants grow where. These changes are evident at a broad scale. But not all areas experience the same climate in the same way, even within the boundaries of a single national park. A new dataset gives park managers a valuable tool for understanding why vegetation has changed and how it might change in the future under different climate-change scenarios.

At Dinosaur National Monument, long-term vegetation monitoring provides park managers with useful information for decisionmaking on topics including climate change, grazing, and fire management. A recent report summarizes 10 years of monitoring in sagebrush and pinyon-juniper communities and provides management recommendations for their conservation.

Scientists from the Northern Colorado Plateau Network travel thousands of miles each year to collect data on plants, soils, and water across network parks. But it would be impossible to cover every square inch of the Northern Colorado Plateau with boots on the ground. Instead, we simultaneously monitor the parks with boots in space—satellite data that provide information at a much broader scale.

At Capitol Reef National Park, long-term monitoring is helping track grassland condition and recovery from grazing. From 2009 to 2018, there was some evidence of continued recovery of vegetation and soils in the park’s retired Cathedral/Rock Springs allotments. Continued monitoring will be crucial to providing managers with the information they need for effective decisionmaking and resource allocation.

The results of a recent study may help land managers to prioritize grassland conservation and restoration efforts. Park managers can’t do much about climate, but with the right information, they can make choices based on how different grassland communities behave in different soil types. In this study, cool-season grasses showed more resilience to drought than warm-season grasses.

Knowing which key natural resources are found in the national parks, and whether they're stable or changing, helps decisionmakers make sound choices. The Northern Colorado Plateau Network is building that knowledge. After more than ten years of monitoring, we've learned a lot about park ecosystems, how they're changing, and what they may look like in the days to come. Find out what we’ve learned and how it’s being used to help managers plan for the future.

Long-term environmental monitoring usually requires complex sampling designs. By necessity, these designs sample a limited set of conditions on just a fraction of the landscape, which results in missing data. This article summarizes recent research that applies Bayesian modeling to three case studies in national parks. This approach allows park ecologists and analysts to move beyond missing data to support data-driven management and monitoring of natural resources.

As the northern Colorado Plateau heads into a hotter, drier future, there will be ecological winners and losers. Figuring out how different vegetation communities will fare is tricky. A recent study aimed to identify which vegetation communities might come out ahead, which might lag behind, and what might make the difference.

If strong, site-specific relationships between various climate and environmental factors can be developed at management scales, then it should be possible to make near-term forecasts of vegetation condition by tracking weather and water balance. Park managers could use this model to help predict the months and years in which projects that depend on good growing conditions, such as restoration activities, might be most likely to succeed.