MOUNTAIN ECOSYSTEM RESPONSES TO CLIMATE IN THE
NORTH AMERICAN WEST AND CIRMOUNT GOALS
Point of Departure for MTNCLIM 2005 Working Group Discussion
Jeremy S. Littell (jlittell@u.washington.edu) and Jeff Hicke (jhicke@nrel.colostate.edu)
Mountain ecosystems (including, but not limited to, forests, woodlands, tundra, fresh water,
meadows, intermontane valleys, and their ecotones) are structured significantly by several
processes sensitive to changes in climate. Such processes include productivity, disturbance (fire,
insects, pathogens), and mortality in the short term and establishment, invasion, species
redistribution and migration in the long term. Evaluating (1) the importance of climate as a driver
of these processes, (2) the role of past climate change in modifying these structuring agents, (3)
the likely future responses given such relationships, and (4) the stationarity of the processes in
question are the key scientific approaches to useful understanding of these large-scale,
mechanism-response ecosystem drivers. Integrating past and future research under the
CIRMOUNT goals grouped under headings of observation, research, communication, and
decision support for mountain/forest ecosystems could be a central organizational theme of a
new working group. The goals of this working group might be to identify such problems (e.g.,
Western Mountain Initiative style), examine solutions, and define collaborative goals for
producing more widely-applicable, climate integrated ecosystem research in the mountainous
West.
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Goals/Purposes of Working Group Breakout Session:
o Define focus/identity of working group: Climate impacts to ecosystems, as
opposed to proxy approach of using ecosystems to identify climate change,
climate variability etc.
o Identify gaps in research
o Identify priorities for CIRMOUNT working group developing around key issues
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Observation: Strategies for future? multi-scale, multi-gradient observations
o What variables should we be measuring? At what spatiotemporal scales?
o How do we sample ecosystems responses to climatic drivers, feedbacks, and
thresholds along steep local and continental gradients such that integrated,
standardized research is possible over a wide array of places and times?
o Is hierarchical sampling and inference actually helpful?
o Wouldn’t scaleable units of more or less universal importance (water balance,
deficit, growing degree days) to plant communities be a better tool than
rainbuckets and thermometers, which are only estimates of how plants see
climate?
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Research: Priorities for new and continuing research
o How sensitive/vulnerable are western mountain ecosystems (and how much
variability exists in that sensitivity across ecosystems, space, and time) to climate
change?
o How adaptable are said ecosystems naturally and given the more
anthropogenically-constrained environment of the 21st century?
o How will ecosystems respond to the interaction of climate change with other
environmental changes such as CO2 fertilization, nitrogen deposition, or land-use
changes?
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Communication: Sharing findings, prioritizing venues etc.
o Identify regional and panarchic, meso-scale relationships. Continental and local
results are already well established; communication should parallel this.
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Decision support: Involving managers, management-specific research
o Involve managers on the ground floor: redefine the relationship between the
scientific community, which sometimes (and sometimes necessarily) makes
management recommendations without fully understanding the needs of resource
managers.
o Identify more specific needs at appropriate scales for specific agencies and
conservation organizations (e.g., The Nature Conservancy), specific systems,
structures etc.