The look of the forests in the Roaring Fork Valley may be dramatically different in the future. High elevation forests could be replaced with lower growing species like aspens. A new website shows how forests in the American West will look different under climate change. The local nonprofit Aspen Center for Environmental Studies worked with scientists to develop the site.
Jamie Werner is Forest Program Director at ACES. Her laptop’s propped open and she’s clicking around the site, forestforecasts.org.
"So here we have Aspen Mountain and Aspen Highlands…”
She’s chosen to see how quaking aspen forests look in our area under a worst case climate scenario: the current status quo.
"If we’re looking at Aspen Mountain, the lower reaches of aspens are just below the Sundeck. We see the lower reaches of aspens on Aspen Highlands just about at Cloud Nine level."
The Sundeck and Cloud Nine restaurants sit at elevations around 11,000 feet.
The Forest Forecasting tool shows how carbon emissions and temperature rise will impact 100 tree species in the intermountain west. Under the worst case scenario, the region could lose 40 percent of its forests 50 years now.
Another change in Aspen would happen downtown. pinyon pine trees now common in Glenwood Springs would begin to grow here.
Officials at ACES worked with scientists at the University of Arizona to build the website. It took over a year.
"A big initial challenge was gathering all the data that this website is based on," says Werner. "So we have these maps showing forest change through time but the current maps, the maps that show where trees are now, are based on millions of on-the-ground species observations.”
Those observations from the Forest Service were combined with the most recent climate models and run through supercomputers in Texas.
Werner says the idea is to make complex science understandable and give people a climate story that’s easier to relate to than say, melting glaciers.
"Most of us, unless you’re very lucky, have never actually stood on a glacier that’s melting. But almost all of us, have walked through a forest. And our forests are, in the same way glaciers are melting, are really contracting.”
Under the worst case climate scenario, the model shows dramatic reductions in giant sequoia in California’s Sierras. And, expanding Saguaro Cacti in the southwest.
A “worst-case” change in forests could also mean less water in the west. High elevation forests store snowpack that’s released into rivers and eventually becomes drinking water. Those forests would shrink.
"How we manage our mountains is going to be affected by the health of the forests," says Auden Schendler, Vice President of Sustainability for the Aspen Skiing Company.
A change in forest type may reduce good snow pockets in spruce forests for skiing. But, Schendler says bigger impacts may be noticed off mountain.
"If you hike the Arbaney Kittle trail in the midvalley, there’s been a lot of Englemann spruce death. Of course, in Summit County, lodgepole pine has been devastated. So these changes are happening now. This tool affirms that and lets us look into the future.”
Jamie Werner with ACES expects the website will be used in schools, the park system, and by the public. She says the goal is to reach policy makers and bring down carbon emissions to avoid the worst-case scenario.
"This will happen in our lifetime. We will see forests change between now and 2080, but how much they change is up to us," says Werner.
You can find a link to the site by clicking here.