At approximately 12,000 feet in elevation, the mountain looks far from untouched. 384 plots of land outlined by yarn-like string, are part of an experiment. Residing inside these plots are neon flamingos, hearts on picks, and plastic butterflies. Upon closer inspection, brown-colored alpine plants closely cover the ground. These plants are the focus of an experiment taking place on the Front Range’s southern Rocky Mountains.
Each plot of land, affectionately referred to as “little turf wafers”, required dozens of people for transport. The goal was to move these plots from colder parts of the mountain (often found on the north facing side at higher elevations) to warmer locations (slightly lower in elevation and mostly south facing.) This change in environment is meant to simulate future temperature increases and environmental changes expected with climate change.
“My lab in particular is most interested in tracking how individual plants respond,” says Nancy Emery. “You have to visit the exact same plant year after year, and you want to know if it dies, or if it skips a year growing, or if it flowered that year, or if it grew, or if it did worse this year than it did the year before.”
Emery, the faculty director of the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, studies plant evolution. She is a lead researcher on this turf transplant experiment.
Miles Moore, a PhD candidate who works in Emery’s lab, says he visits around 1,400 of these plants every day to collect data.
“I have journals upon journals upon journals. I print out something like 80 pages of data sheets a day before I come up here, and usually all 80 of those pages are full of notes by the end of the day,” says Moore.
Climate change is also contributing to a reduction in snowpack. For plants in alpine environments, this could mean exposure to harsh winds and lower temperatures.
“I think of it as a blanket, an insulating blanket, and it's odd to think of snow that way, because we think of it as very cold and wet. But compared to the air that's above it, it protects the ground from temperature fluctuations,” says Emery.
The Niwot Ridge LTER program has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1980, and has some of the longest, most continuous data sets in the world. This past year, they lost 20% of next year's funding – money that was already approved – due to anticipated budget cuts.
Emery has lost sleep over the future of research at Niwot. A gap in the long term data sets is worrying, but her bigger fear is losing the well-trained staff who collect the data because of federal cuts.
She draws parallels from the plants she studies to current concerns in the scientific community.
“If the plant has reliable cues, it can make adjustments to be prepared for those cues. Winter is on its way, so that might be a very useful cue for plants to use to start shutting down and kind of getting into winter mode,” says Emery. “If you take away the predictability of those cues, they no longer can anticipate what's coming and changing in their environment. And that is, in a way, what is the most difficult right now is the uncertainty in what's happening, the increase, the decrease in predictability of the future of funding.”
