Global warming will require land managers throughout the West to re-examine the way they do business, and next week’s Mountain Climate Conference in Silverton will look at some of the changes in store.
The conference, hosted by Mountain Studies Institute, gets under way in Silverton on Monday, bringing some 120 scientists and public land managers to town to discuss the latest news on global warming and how it may affect the Western mountains.
Connie Millar, co-chair of the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains (CIRMOUNT), said the June 9-12 conference at Kendall Mountain Community Center is the “flagship meeting” hosted by the consortium.
Millar, a Forest Service researcher at the Pacific Southwest Research Station in Albany, Calif., said the conference is part of a grassroots effort — “not government-sponsored.”
“We do it because we feel the need to integrate across disciplines,” Millar said, to manage Western lands more effectively in light of a changing climate.
“There has been a surge of interest from resource managers wanting to know ‘what do we do now?’” Millar said. “That’s a very hard question for us to address as scientists. It has to come from dialogue.”
Millar pointed to changes in snowpack and an expanding fire season in the West as among the issues that will require resource managers to adapt.
“Water managers have been particularly interested in following our crowd and learning what we know about historical water availability,” Millar said.
She said that with climate change being “superimposed” on natural drought cycles, “20th century variability doesn’t make it any more.”
She said warming has allowed insects to attack trees at higher elevations, producing in the West “mortality events we haven’t seen in thousands of years.”
Henry Diaz, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, agreed the impacts of climate change are already being felt in the West. Diaz is also a co-chair of the conference.
“Specific examples are changes in streamflow, phonological changes (earlier flowering of shrubs), larger wildfires and longer fire seasons, and insect infestations,” Diaz said in an e-mail.
“Water resources or the lack of water from streams to satisfy current and future needs will be near the top of the agenda,” Diaz said.
He said the contributions of Western forests in carbon sequestration to reduce carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be discussed.
Climate change could also make it easier for invasive species to gain footholds in the West, and might affect mitigation efforts to reduce or eliminate such invasives.
Last year’s Mountain Climate Conference was held at Timberline, Ore.
Millar said CIRMOUNT tries to keep the event small and tries to hold it in small mountain towns.
“That’s why we’re coming to your town,” Millar said.