College of Letters & Science

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN HEALTH IN MONTANA: A Special Report of the Montana Climate Assessment
(Montana Institute on Ecosystems, 2020-12) Adams, Alexandra K.; Byron, Robert; Maxwell, Bruce D.; Higgins, Susan; Eggers, Margaret; Byron, Lori; Whitlock, Cathy
The purpose of this assessment is to a) present understandable, science-based, Montana-specific information about the impacts of climate change on the health of Montanans; and b) describe how our healthcare providers, state leaders, communities, and individuals can best prepare for and reduce those impacts in the coming decades. This assessment draws from, and is an extension to, the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment (MCA1) (Whitlock et al. 2017), which provides the first detailed analysis of expected impacts to Montana’s water, forests, and agriculture from climate change. MCA explains historical, current, and prospective climate trends for the state based on the best-available science. The 2017 Montana Climate Assessment did not address the impact of climate change on the health of Montanans. This special report of the MCA fills that important knowledge gap; it represents a collaboration between climate scientists and Montana’s healthcare community and is intended to help Montanans minimize the impacts of climate on their health.
Vulnerability of dryland agricultural regimes to economic and climatic change
(2018) Lawrence, Patrick G.; Maxwell, Bruce D.; Rew, Lisa J.; Ellis, Colter; Bekkerman, Anton
Large-scale agricultural systems are central to food production in North America, but their ubiquity could be threatened by vulnerability to economic and climatic stressors during the 21st century. Prior research has focused on understanding the influence of climatic changes on physiological processes in these systems and has increasingly recognized that other factors such as social, economic, and ecological variation and the interaction among these factors may cause unexpected outcomes. We assess the vulnerability of large-scale agricultural systems to variation in multiple stressors and investigate alternative adaptation strategies under novel conditions. We examine dryland farms in Montana’s northern Great Plains (NGP), which represent large-scale semiarid agricultural systems that are likely to be affected by climate change. Farmers in the NGP have experienced three distinct periods of economic- and drought-related stressors since the 1970s, primarily driven by uncertainty in soil moisture, but at times amplified by uncertainty in nitrogen fertilizer and wheat prices. We seek to better understand how farmers evaluate and respond to these conditions. The results indicate that although farmers perceived few alternative agronomic options for adapting to drought, strategies for adapting to high input prices were more plentiful. Furthermore, we find that increasing the overall resilience of dryland agricultural systems to economic and climatic uncertainty requires intrinsic valuation of crop rotations and their field-specific response to inputs.
Pinus contorta invasions increase wildfire fuel loads and may create a positive feedback with fire
(2017-03) Taylor, Kimberley T.; Maxwell, Bruce D.; McWethy, David B.; Pauchard, Anibal; Nunez, Martin A.; Whitlock, Cathy
Invasive plant species that have the potential to alter fire regimes have significant impacts on native ecosystems. Concern that pine invasions in the Southern Hemisphere will increase fire activity and severity and subsequently promote further pine invasion prompted us to examine the potential for feedbacks between Pinus contorta invasions and fire in Patagonia and New Zealand. We determined how fuel loads and fire effects were altered by P. contorta invasion. We also examined post-fire plant communities across invasion gradients at a subset of sites to assess how invasion alters the post-fire vegetation trajectory. We found that fuel loads and soil heating during simulated fire increase with increasing P. contorta invasion age or density at all sites. However, P. contorta density did not always increase post-fire. In the largest fire, P. contorta density only increased significantly post-fire where the pre-fire P. contorta density was above an invasion threshold. Below this threshold, P. contorta did not dominate after fire and plant communities responded to fire in a similar manner as uninvaded communities. The positive feedback observed at high densities is caused by the accumulation of fuel that in turn results in greater soil heating during fires and high P. contorta density post-fire. Therefore, a positive feedback may form between P. contorta invasions and fire, but only above an invasion density threshold. These results suggest that management of pine invasions before they reach the invasion density threshold is important for reducing fire risk and preventing a transition to an alternate ecosystem state dominated by pines and novel understory plant communities.

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