Hey there, and welcome to our first blog post! My name is Chiara Forrester and I’m a first year PhD student in Dr. William Bowman’s lab. Most folks in our lab study plant communities and nitrogen cycling in the alpine. For my dissertation, I’m broadly interested in how climate change will affect alpine plant communities. One of the changes occurring in mountain environments due to climate change is less snowfall and early snowmelt. In addition to ecological concerns, this symptom of a warming climate is garnering a lot of attention from the outdoor recreation industry, which is extremely important in Colorado’s economy (check out Protect Our Winters, or POW). If you’re interested in how this issue might affect the economy, check out these impacts that the Protect Our Winters organization has put together: Climate warming is causing a trend toward less snowfall, and earlier spring snowmelt. Snowpack is awesome for building snow people and having snowball fights, but is also very important in alpine ecology. It impacts nutrient cycling, plant diversity and time of flowering, the water cycle and even tropospheric air temperatures. If you love snow sports, this means a shorter season. If you’re a plant (good job reading this!) you might flower earlier, which could affect your species’ population or other species you live next to. It could also mean you have to deal with soils that are dry for longer without as long of an insulation period under the snow, causing more competition within and between different species. Warming is especially affecting mountain ecosystems because of the large changes that happen across small distances, such as the types of species that live in a given place and the environmental characteristics (such as soil moisture) specific to that area. In order to understand what impacts altered snow dynamics might have on our environment, we need to continue to ask questions! Conducting research can allow us to use our findings to make targeted management/conservation plans to lessen any negative impacts. I’m working toward doing research on how plant species and their fungal partners will be affected by early snowmelt. I want to know not just how plant diversity and the types of species living in a given place might change, but also how their interactions with fungi might change. If earlier snowmelt is stressful for plants, I’m wondering if plants will recruit more fungal friends to help them access nutrients and deal with drought. Here’s a fun podcast by RadioLab on relationships between plants and fungi.
Once I start fieldwork I’ll post some (hopefully rad) pictures of our experimental design, but until then feel free to ask any questions you might have!
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