RMBL hosts panel discussion on future of the Gunnison Valley

“It’s about people who love a place…”

The scientists who make their summer homes at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic might be better situated than anyone, anywhere—with their decades of accumulated data on the systems and cycles of life in the Upper East River Valley and a profuse understanding of the past—to give us a sense of what’s in store for the natural systems of the Gunnison Valley.

David Inouye has been studying the plants of the area for 40 years. billy barr has been tracking avalanches and weather data in Gothic for 40 years. Scott Wissinger has researched the life in alpine ponds and wetlands in the area for 25 years. And Dr. Bobbi Peckarsky has carried out a 38-year study of aquatic life at sites on the East River and in the surrounding drainage—likely the longest-running study of localized stream life in the world.
And it’s all done with an eye to the future.
So what do they see? RMBL hosted a discussion last week with Peckarsky and five other panelists presenting a variety of perspectives on what the Gunnison Country might look like in 25 years.
Certain things are more predictable than others about the future, as it turns out. The concern about water that grips the valley isn’t likely to go away, nor is the increasingly unpredictable climate. In equal measure, there’s hope in the understanding that the discussion about the future that’s happening locally, and the people discussing it, is unique and might be the best chance we have to make a difference.
Tim Sullivan, state director for the Nature Conservancy, which got its start in Colorado with the Mexican Cut Preserve near Schofield Pass, said, “The answer to the question of what this basin is going to look like in 25 years that I want to give is, ‘It depends on all of us.’ We can study and understand climate change but what we need to begin to do is—do something about it.”
With the data being produced by RMBL scientists, Sullivan said, the Nature Conservancy was able to make better-informed decisions about how and where to practice its conservation mission.
“But what that means is that we have an opportunity to put things back together, to build resiliency, to build health in our ecosystems in a way that allows us to adapt to the changes we’re likely to see with climate change,” he said.
For National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climatologist Dr. Imtiaz Rangwala, who has studied the climate in mountain systems around the world, the question is an impossible one to answer, although there’s certainty in the prospect of change.
During his graduate work, Rangwala studied the climate of the Tibetan Plateau and the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. Long-term climate data from both places, he said, showed temperatures getting warmer. And while the warming was “very rapid” on the Tibetan Plateau, in the San Juans the warming became apparent only between 1994 and 2005, when the temperature increased almost two degrees Fahrenheit.
According to Rangwala, of those years, 2002 was notably dry and 2003 was the warmest year on record. “I think 2012 is next in line to that,” he said.
After being invited to the discussion, Rangwala said, “I looked at data from Crested Butte and Gunnison and really there was no trend. But then I looked at the data for Cochetopa Pass and of course that was showing the warming trend. So that’s the mountain system for you. Understanding climate change in the Southwest is really a tricky business. You can’t look at one place and expect things to be happening in a very wide area. This is not Kansas.”
And while the climate data is helpful in understanding how the weather might change in the future, Rangwala admitted that a perspective informed entirely by the data would be too narrow, as his own data had failed to inform him of the dust-on-snow events changing the timing of the spring runoff in recent years.
“There’s uncertainty in the data and some show a 5 to 10 percent increase in precipitation, and others show 5 to 10 percent decrease in precipitation,” he said, adding, “Temperatures will likely increase one to three degrees Celsius or two to five degrees Fahrenheit, however.”
As for the temperature, John Norton, a panelist and former executive of ski areas in Aspen in Crested Butte who was invited to provide a ski industry perspective of the past and some musings on the future, said, “It always seemed to me that it snowed better when we weren’t having penetratingly cold temperatures.” He said he’s curious, “as we warm up a little bit in this valley, if that wouldn’t be an advantage in terms of overall snowfall.”
To Rangwala’s point about uncertainty in the data, Sullivan said on-the-ground observation made by scientists are proving that the amount of water forecast for the future is only part of the concern over water.
Sullivan said the Nature Conservancy had carried out an assessment showing “even without precipitation change, there will be a 10 to 25 percent decrease in stream flow. There is uncertainty, but no matter what, we are likely to have lower water.”
Rangwala responded, “The best-case scenario is to be wet and warm. The worst-case scenario would be hot and dry.”
To a terrestrial ecologist like panelist Dr. Mary Price, who has been doing research on ecological processes at RMBL since 1976, the impacts of the changes in climate are written on the hillsides, in invasive plants that never gained a foothold until recently.
“How are ecological systems responding to those changes? One thing that we have noticed … is the extent of invasive plants. There are a lot of plants that were extremely rare, or at least we weren’t noticing, in the ‘70s that are now taking over in places,” Price said. “Butter and Eggs was probably planted by some biologist or miner and sat very well behaved for many years until the mid-90s, when it just exploded and took over the entire moraine.
“So one thing that I would look for in the next 25 years, unless we do something, is the number of really nice areas to go to look for wildflowers could become harder and harder to find,” Price said.
Jan Washburn, who grew up in the Gunnison Valley and now helps manage Spann Ranches, explained that a lack of water is already affecting the way ranchers irrigate their hay meadows. And it has more to do with the amount of water leaving the system, and not only the amount going into it.
“As a child I can remember when the valley was more open,” Washburn said, listing the subdivisions that weren’t here. “Crested Butte South, Skyland, Riverbend, Riverland, Meridian, Butte Pastures. Definitely the population has increased, which we expect it to do. And with population increase comes a need for water.”
RMBL board president Wissinger likened the ground water system of streams and ponds to a colander sitting in standing water. As the groundwater around the streams and ponds falls lower and lower, the surface water reflects that.
In a climate where the days below freezing outnumber the days without frost, the potential for rising temperatures was less of a concern among the panelists than the loss of water that could come in the next 25 years.
For Spann Ranches, Washburn says, “Water is one of the greatest challenges we’re going to face. And of course climatology plays a huge role in that. The seasons are more unpredictable and the seasons we have seem to be extreme lately. You go from a huge winter to extreme drought and there’s not much in between.”
With “normal” years becoming less common, the dry years are starting to change the seasonal nature of the ground water that a lot of life in the Gunnison Country depends on. Stream ecologist Peckarsky—and, as it turned out, Wissinger—are seeing a shortened season between the spring thaw and the point in the summer when ground water largely dries up.
Peckarsky, who is Professor Emeritus of Entomology and Stream Ecology at Cornell University and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Zoology and adjunct professor of entomology at the University of Wisconsin, explained, “That window of time between peak flow and base flow is being squashed and the length of it is a driver for how successful recruitment is of the next generation [of aquatic insects].”
Wissinger added, “There’s beginning to be a signal in terms of the early date at which things melt. … We’re actually seeing that same window narrowing in the meadows below Gothic.”
Like many of the scientists at RMBL, Peckarsky isn’t studying the climate directly, but instead focuses on the changes happening on the ground—in her case the stream systems that are the recipients of everything that goes on around them.
“In the 40 years I’ve been here, there seems to be more of those sorts of maybe long-term changes that may not be reversible any longer. High-water years and low-water years were always occurring,” she said. “But maybe the legacy effects of the extreme high and the extreme low without anything in between is causing changes that we’re observing in the changes in the streams that I didn’t see in the first 35 years I was here.”
The clearest example Peckarsky had of such a change was didymo, a single-celled diatom, or algae, that’s been recorded in streams around the Upper East River since the 1950s. Didymo, she said, was a serious concern because of the intensity with which it had begun to bloom in years the spring thaw came early.
“I never saw it for my first 30 years here and in the last seven or eight it’s grown to be a significant problem,” Peckarsky said. “It changes the community of organisms to the extent that fish growth, brook trout growth, is reduced by 40 percent because the bugs [don’t develop].”
And even after all the connections were made between the unpredictable seasons and the temperature and the didymo and the water, the question remained: What will the Gunnison Country look like in 25 years?
It will be different, the panelists agreed, perhaps warmer, with more moisture, or less, maybe with an as of yet unrevealed outbreak of an invasive plant or a nascent algae bloom. It’s all pretty much unknowable.
Yet confidence was high. “It’s not just about scientific research, but people who love a place and want to understand it and want to continue to enjoy it,” Price said. “So I think the power of having people who focus on this place gives us a great deal of power to do something about it, to come to common ground because everybody loves this place.”
In closing, RMBL director Ian Billick, who moderated the discussion, said, “We talk a lot about knowledge being power. On a very optimistic note if there’s any community worldwide that’s powerful, it’s probably this community. The more we know about this community, the more power we’ll have to influence our future than anyplace else … We should take a lot of pride in that.”