Motorists cruising the famed Peak to Peak Highway north of Nederland as they savor the scenery or head out for a visit to Brainard Lake might well sail right past a modest signpost for one of the highest elevation long-term ecological research sites in the world.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Mountain Research Station, within the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and situated just a few miles west off of Colo. 72, is the jumping-off point for some of the most important ongoing research into the nuanced and changing dynamics of alpine ecology going on anywhere in North America.
Increasingly, the focus of that work relates directly to the signals and effects of climate change — a problem not even being considered by scientists when University of Colorado biology professor Francis Ramaley launched the Tolland Summer Biology Camp in the vicinity in 1909.
That camp, where primary tools included shotguns, shovels and butterfly nets, closed in 1919, and after the university bought the land to the north, it built what was known as the University Camp.
It was a successor to Ramaley, biology professor John W. Marr, who in 1946 would initiate the Mountain Ecology Project, the Mountain Climate Program, and the East Slope Ecology Project, and who was key to establishing the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Ecology, which would merge in 1952 with the University Camp as the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
The frontier of research into the effects of a changing climate, where animals and plants are living at the extreme limits of environmental tolerance at up to 12,000 feet, has continued to be expanded there — with ground-penetrating radar and drones now displacing shotguns and shovels — for well over half a century.
“The idea that humans could have such a pervasive impact on not just regional environment but the global environment, I don’t think was really understandable back then,” Bill Bowman, research station director for the past 29 years, said of its earliest days.
Now, said Bowman, a professor in the CU Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, “It is the very theme of research that goes on there, the impacts of humans on the environment.”
An alphabet soup of laboratories and agencies participate directly in research based out of the research station. They include not just INSTAAR, the National Ecological Observatory Network, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Critical Zone Observatory, but also researchers who don’t have weighty acronyms anchored to their curriculum vitae.
“We’ve got everything from individual grad students doing their masters theses, up to the groups that have been working up there for almost 40 years now,” Bowman said. “And so really, anybody can do research up there. We don’t make a distinction about whether they are rich and famous, or just starting in science. We really take pride in that a lot of researchers get their first experience in doing research up there.”
The case for precision
The mechanized rumble of a snowcat is the soundtrack to the daily commute for many scientists who utilize the research station.
The Mountain Research Station base facilities, including the John W. Marr Alpine Laboratory, a family lodge with capacity for up to 32 visitors, and the Kiowa Laboratory and Classroom, with meeting space to accommodate 24, are perched at a mere 9,500 feet.
With individual data collection points spread across a challenging terrain topping out with the highest at 12,267 feet, and snow that can pile up in some spots as deep as 15 to 20 feet, simply navigating this living laboratory can be an imposing challenge.
But many of those who work there consider the opportunity to do so a gift. An example would be Duane Kitzis, a senior research associate for CU Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, who works for the Global Monitoring Division of the Earth System Research Laboratory at NOAA. He has been going up Niwot Ridge since 1987, collecting air samples that are used to provide calibration material for the measurement of greenhouse gases at laboratories around the world. He now makes more than 400 standard air measurements per year up there.
The Global Monitoring Division at NOAA also has been taking air samples to measure greenhouse gases since 1967, from a separate collection site high on Niwot Ridge. This was the first site in the division’s Cooperative Air Sampling Network, which now spans 68 sites in 36 countries, including the South Pole. Each flask sample contains air with all the gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and halocarbons, present in air at their natural concentrations. Fifty five different gases are accurately measured from each flask.
Fifty-five different trace gas species are precisely measured from the air in each flask sampled.
“Continuous long-term measurement programs is of utmost importance,” Kitzis said. “One of our missions is atmospheric monitoring of greenhouse-gas related molecules, and in order to look at very small spacial and temporal changes, you need continuous measurement data. You shouldn’t just make up data where we haven’t been taking it.”
Both the NOAA flask-collection site and the standards preparation site, over which Kitzis presides, are wholly managed by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division.
“Two days a week, I go to a small remote area of the Rocky Mountains,” he said. “In a nutshell, that’s heaven for me. Over the years, I’ve seen bear, moose, lion, bobcat, elk, let alone the smaller creatures. I have been lucky enough to be immersed in nature every week of my life. There are days I drive a snowcat to work, or I might hike or ski up. In the summer I can drive up, and when I lock the gate … behind me, I know it’s one of the best jobs I could ever have.”
He sees his work as critical to understanding the continually evolving picture of changes occurring in the atmosphere.
“In order for us to make statements about the ever-increasing carbon dioxide and the other trace gases effecting climate change, if we’re going to talk about changes in fossil fuel emission sources and sinks as they relate to fossil fuel production, we need to have a continuous timeline made up of the very best measurement precision. This is what the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network team does”
‘It’s too dry’
Katharine Suding is the lead investigator for one of the major research programs being conducted in the breathtaking landscape above the research station. Known as the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research program, it’s an interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at building a predictive understanding of ecological processes in high-elevation mountain ecosystems, and contributing to broad advances in ecology.
“We need long-term studying and monitoring of these complex systems to start being able to understand how they work and predict how they’re going to work in the future,” Suding said of the project, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.
The Niwot Ridge research program has climate records (both temperature and precipitation) dating to 1952 at four places along an elevation gradient topping out at its “D1” site; that’s the one perched at 12,267 feet.
Suding’s project has the regular involvement of about 15 faculty, eight staff members, 25 graduate students and 10 undergraduates at CU Boulder. A few are stationed full time at the research station, and one or two rarely stray from the work under microscopes examining samples at laboratories down in Boulder. Most split their time between the city and the alpine world.
On a recent trip — by snowcat, across the snow that still blanketed the landscape well into May — through her program’s 4-square-mile research area, Suding, a professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at CU and fellow at INSTAAR, observed the interplay of snowpack, snowmelt, changes in temperature and air quality impact the fragile ecosystem in myriad ways.
“We know that in the forests, with a longer summer, the forests don’t do as well, because they get really stressed out in July and August, when it’s really hot and they don’t have the moisture,” she said. “We thought this tree line would go up, if the summer was longer and hotter. But it is not going up, because the young trees can’t start growing up here because it’s too dry.”
Suding noted that while winters are warming, the snowfall at this altitude is still relatively constant.
“It’s really how those two things are changing, together, that’s affecting how the mountains are responding,” she said.
Suding’s research territory borders on the westernmost reaches of the Boulder Watershed, where CU Boulder scientists also collect data, only working under permission from city officials. At the top of the watershed, at 12,513 feet, sits Arikaree Glacier, which Suding’s predecessor Mark Williams predicted could vanish completely in 20 to 25 years. That sobering forecast hasn’t changed.
Predicting our climate future, according to Suding, depends on understanding how our ecology has evolved, particularly in response to the dramatic changes wreaked by the Industrial Revolution.
“The big driving force in our work at Niwot is that we really need to understand our past, what has been happening over the past several decades, in order to understand what is going to happen in the future,” she said.
“I think a lot of times we forget about the importance of monitoring dynamics happening now, and just think about the future. These systems are so complex that we really won’t be able to forecast well unless we have long-term studies and measurements. The water, the wildlife, the skiing, the snow, these are things that the mountains give us, and we need to track them to make sure they are preserved”
CU Boulder geography professor Tom Veblen has been engaged at the research station since 1981 in studies focused on the Engelmann spruce, subalpine fir and lodgepole pine. It has included the individual tagging of one of more than 8,000 trees to track the changes in each one. It is one of very few long-term tree population monitoring studies in the western United States.
“A key finding from monitoring the tree populations is that starting during the mid-1990s, as we saw a trend toward warmer and drier conditions, we have also seen a significant increase in the rate of tree mortality,” Veblen said. “On average, if you look at it altogether, there has been a 250% increase in the rate of tree mortality,” which he said included only the “background” tree mortality, not inclusive of fire or bark beetle infestation.
Work by his doctoral student Robbie Andrus also has revealed that in the past 35 years, the decreased frequency of cooler and wetter years — this spring would mark an exception to that trend — has created a less favorable environment for the establishment of new tree seedlings.
“The basic take-home message for our high-elevation forests, our subalpine forests, is that where some people might have expected that warming temperatures would be favorable (for tree growth), we are finding just the opposite … In the dry, southern Rocky Mountain region, the warming temperatures have a negative impact on the growth of trees and the survival of trees.”
Veblen, whose work is under the auspices of the overall program supervised by Suding, said the living laboratory afforded by the environment above the Mountain Research Station is a tremendous scientific asset. Graduate students have come from as far away as New Zealand to conduct research there, he said.
“It is invaluable, for our own research and for attracting researchers from all over the globe,” he said.
Another partner at the research station is the National Ecological Observatory Network, also funded by the National Science Foundation, which is in the midst of a 30-year project to provide open access continental-scale data on changing ecological and climatological conditions at 81 sites across the United States — 47 terrestrial and 34 aquatic — including an observatory at Niwot Ridge.
“The Niwot site represents a special data point within our observatory — it’s the highest elevation site in our network and representative of the alpine tundra,” said NEON’s Chau Tran, who oversees it. “Data we collect can be used in conjunction with the many existing researchers to increase their data robustness.”
It’s ’emotional, for me’
Riding shotgun in the snowcat on a recent trip with Suding was Noah Molotch, an associate professor of geography at CU Boulder, also a fellow at INSTAAR, and co-lead investigator at the Niwot Ridge project. He was drawn to the study of this ecosystem by a love of snow sparked by his passion for snowboarding, despite being a native of Santa Barbara, where skateboarding was the closest available equivalent.
Molotch can riff at length on how the dynamic interplay between snowfall, accumulation, runoff and ambient temperatures both aloft and down into the soil provide the template for how the spring and summer will play out across the entire Front Range ecosystem, and the importance of learning as much as possible about how one piece in the ecological fabric impacts the next.
But, as the vast acreage of mixed conifers rolls by — most of it new growth replacing what miners of a bygone era leveled for their own uses — he also is able to put the high altitude changes scientists are studying in language that most people who fight the traffic up Interstate 70 to their favorite ski resort can understand.
“We’re at a pretty high elevation, and the temperatures are pretty cold in Colorado, relative to say, the ski resorts in California or Oregon or Washington state. And so what that means is the most obvious impacts of climate warming on skiing will be seen in those places, before they are seen here,” he said.
But the impacts will be seen on our own winter playgrounds, initially in the composition of snow, as warmer air temperatures affect snow density, resulting in less fluffy champagne powder, producing instead the heavier, wetter snow such as what Molotch recalls — and not fondly — at Lake Tahoe.
While sea rise and intensified hurricanes are the climate change signals that get headlines, the changing characteristics to our snow that he foresees — and is studying, through tools such as an 88-square grid of snow pits monitored near the Niwot Ridge saddle’s tundra lab at 11,600 feet — matter, too.
“The exhilarating way it makes me feel, the winter experience I have living in Colorado, what drew me to Colorado as a snowboard bum in the 1990s, that’s a huge part of my life. And the thought that my kids or my grandkids or their grandkids may not experience that in the same way that I do, is emotional for me and it’s sad. And I think for a lot of people in Colorado, if they think about it in a really deep way, it probably has a similar feel.”
Bowman strives to be at the research station once a week, despite many duties within his department at CU Boulder, and would like to be up there a lot more often. As much as he recognizes the importance of all the work that is done there, he relishes the opportunity it affords to regularly reconnect with the aspects of the Colorado experience that makes life here special.
However, he noted, he does live on site from early June to mid-August, when school is out and winter finally abandons its grip on the rugged landscape for only a matter of weeks.
“It’s one of the best-kept secrets,” he said of his assignment. “That’s the best job at CU.”
