{"id":31897,"date":"2023-09-07T15:45:44","date_gmt":"2023-09-07T15:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/report-examines-impacts-of-climate-change-on-drought-vegetation-in-four-corners-area\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T07:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:48:16","slug":"report-examines-impacts-of-climate-change-on-drought-vegetation-in-four-corners-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/report-examines-impacts-of-climate-change-on-drought-vegetation-in-four-corners-area\/","title":{"rendered":"Report examines impacts of climate change on drought, vegetation in Four Corners area"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"This
This 2013 photo shows a bullet-ridden stock crossing sign on rangeland. A new study examines the impacts of climate change on drought and vegetation in the Four Corners region. Mead Gruver\/The Associated Press<\/span>Mead Gruver<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

By changing the climate, humans have doubled the magnitude of drought\u2019s impact on the availability of vegetation for herbivores, including livestock, to eat in the greater Four Corners region, according to a study published this summer in the journal Earth\u2019s Future.<\/p>\n

This is because increasing air temperatures and increasing levels of evaporative demand \u2013 or more water being soaked up into the atmosphere \u2013 stresses the grasses and shrubs that livestock and many other herbivores rely upon.<\/p>\n

Emily Williams, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California Merced, was the lead author of the study. At the time, she was a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

She has a personal connection to the Southwest, as her grandparents once lived in Arizona.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a kid, I would go to the Southwest quite a bit and really fell in love with the desert landscape,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the only reason Williams chose to look into how climate change could be impacting the vegetation in the greater Four Corners region.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really interested in understanding better how rising temperatures contribute to, exacerbate and play with the natural variability leading to drought,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the southwestern U.S. is really this beautiful, interesting, dramatic landscape. It\u2019s a semiarid region. You have vegetation that\u2019s so well adapted to pretty dry conditions and can deal with droughts. But with climate change droughts are hotter, droughts are more intense, and these higher temperatures are really exacerbating droughts and impacting vegetation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams said she and the other researchers wanted to understand that process in part because of the climate similarities to other regions of the world, including parts of the Horn of Africa where the Climate Hazards Center at UCSB is working to understand the impacts of drought and it\u2019s relationship to food security.<\/p>\n

They set out to answer a two-part question: \u201cHow has human-induced climate change affected air temperatures and atmospheric evaporative demand in the greater Four Corners region of the Southwest and what have the corresponding impacts been to vegetative productivity?\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, how are humans causing the Four Corners region to become hotter and drier and what impacts does that have on the vegetation?<\/p>\n

One unique approach that the researchers took was evaluating the vapor pressure deficit. This refers to the difference between how much moisture is in the air and how much moisture the air can hold when it is fully saturated.<\/p>\n

Casey Spackman, a range management specialist with the New Mexico State University extension office, said the vapor pressure deficit is not something that he has seen implemented into the applications used to help ranchers determine how much forage may be available for their livestock. This caught his attention, but he said more research is needed to determine to what extent it could be worked into the models that ranchers use.<\/p>\n

\u201cTime will tell on if vapor pressure (deficit) can be used to better predict forage production, which, from the study, it\u2019s a great hypothesis,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Spackman, who was not involved in the study, said the researchers were pretty straightforward in what they were trying to accomplish and that eventually the models could be implemented into some of the applications for predicting stocking rates and long-term environmental impacts for rangelands.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has its strengths, but with every model, we have to understand both the strengths and weaknesses to make any sort of inference into how to use it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Through the modeling exercise, Williams and her team concluded that humans have worsened the periods of time when there is not enough forage. This is especially apparent in New Mexico, according to the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur findings indicate that increased temperatures from human-caused climate change have had and will have an increasingly damaging effect on rangeland vegetation, with large implications for both local ecosystems and communities that depend on southwestern rangeland resources,\u201d the researchers wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

The research brought some results that Williams had not expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeserts are not rainy places. They\u2019re places that don\u2019t get a lot of precipitation, you expect hot temperatures,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so what we were expecting is that precipitation would be sort of the biggest constraining factor for vegetation. So, hot temperatures, yes, important, but if you don\u2019t get enough rainfall, grasses and shrubs just aren\u2019t going to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Williams found she had underestimated the influence that increasing temperatures have on plants. The research indicated that during times of high temperatures, the heat had as much impact on the plants as the precipitation \u2013 or lack of precipitation \u2013 did.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe temperatures are doing enough to reduce soil moisture and constrain plant growth,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

This did not surprise Spackman, who said ranchers are aware of the impacts heat has on vegetation.<\/p>\n

When it gets hot, plants close their stomata and just stop photosynthesis. Essentially, they stop growing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe, as scientists, try to quantify (producers\u2019) knowledge. They know. They just don\u2019t have the scientific information to back what they already know \u2026 It\u2019s pretty common sense to say when it gets hot, what do we as people do?\u201d he said. \u201cWe shut down. We go into hiding. We don\u2019t want to be out in that heat. The plants do the same thing. They have a coping strategy of shutting down their respiration and trying to conserve as much water as possible to survive. So it\u2019s going to have an impact. It\u2019s just how much of an impact the higher temperatures will have on these plants. Will their coping mechanism of shutting down or limiting respiration affect their survival?\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams focused on the impacts to plants that are important to livestock in part because she and her team felt that the impacts of climate change on the ranching sector have not been broadly studied and because ranching is such an integral part of many people\u2019s lives in the Southwest.<\/p>\n

While doing the research, she said she spoke with various groups and people who live in the greater Four Corners region. Those people include members of Zuni Pueblo who told her that their animals were not finding sufficient forage and that they had resorted to purchasing feed to supplement what was naturally available.<\/p>\n

These are concerns that Spackman hears as well. In his role as a range management specialist, he travels the state and speaks to ranchers and other stakeholders. The three main concerns people ask about are drought, stocking rates and forage quality. All three of those subjects can be interlinked.<\/p>\n

When it comes to purchasing supplemental feed, Spackman said that is never a good idea unless the ranchers are buying forage.<\/p>\n

Oftentimes, ranchers choose to cope with drought by selling off some of their animals to reduce the size of their herds.<\/p>\n

Spackman said this is a difficult decision because it is hard for ranchers to recover after selling off animals.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not as simple as going out and buying new animals,\u201d he said, explaining that the ranchers build the genetic composition of herds to produce the best quality product for consumers.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if we have a few good years, there\u2019s a little bit of lag in rebuilding those herd sizes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still more work to be done investigating how climate change is impacting rangelands health and what that could mean for ranchers.<\/p>\n

Williams explained that the recent paper was an attribution study that looked at the observed impacts of climate change. She said it could easily be extended into projections that could give people a sense of what conditions may look like in the coming decades.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, her focus has shifted away from the rangelands. She is now looking at how rising temperatures impact how much water is available for irrigation.<\/p>\n

While her attention may have turned to irrigation water, she said she would like to keep exploring projections for how climate change is impacting and will impact rangeland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

are causing the Four Corners region to become hotter and drier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[785,1030],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-31897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-climate","tag-environment"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31897"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81603,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31897\/revisions\/81603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31897"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=31897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}