Research Projects

This project goal is to conduct detailed hydrologic studies of depressional prairie potholes, survey bird species and count amphibian egg mass numbers associated with prairie potholes on the Fort Belknap Indian Community.

Hailstone National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is a ~ 2,000-acre area located in northern Stillwater County. A combination of natural factors such as saline seeps and selenium-rich bedrock, and anthropogenic causes such as the loss of native grasslands, summer-fallow agricultural practices, and the presence of a dam (now dismantled), have resulted in salt concentrations as high as 88,900 μS/cm (seawater is about 55,000 μS/cm) and selenate concentrations as high as ~3,000 μg/L in places (chronic water standard for selenium is 5 μg/L).

 The IoE partnered in a collaboration among several state and federal agencies and non-governmental organizations interested in the management of Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in a 5,000,000+ acre landscape of Northern Montana. 

This project seeks to further information gathering, to record the stories, experiences, and observations of Blackfeet Elders and area ranchers related to climate change and its impact on the local ecology as well as the impact on local ranching practices.

Integrate the novel microbial modeling algorithms into the ecosystem models developed above to simulate the interactive effects of climate, vegetation, land-­‐use and disturbance on ecosystem structure and function, from microbial to landscape scale.

The Multi-scale Assessment of Riverscape Complexity (MARC) Project is linking remote sensing of floodplain complexity to niche composition, microbial diversity, and ecosystem functioning across Montana’s riverscapes.

 Our main objective is to explore how landscape structure mediates the spatial patterns of water delivery, storage, and availability, and the resulting tree responses to these spatial and temporal patterns of water availability. 

This initiative is designed to ensure integration of social-ecological systems inquiry in the total portfolio of research capacity in the IoE to better understand Montana's ecosystems undergoing rapid change.  The team is working to advance integration and projects in the areas of ecosystem goods and services, communitiy resilience, water resource management, and climate adaptation.

The objectives of this project are to 1) support the paleo-ecological component of archeological investigations, 2) conduct reconnaissance study of kettle lakes and assess suitability for providing Holocene pollen and charcoal records, and 3) conduct a reconnaissance study of alluvial fan  and floodplain stratigraphy on both sides of the Big Belts.

This reseearch area investigates mainly how vegetation dynamics have responded to global change at regional to global scales using dynamic global vegetation models.

• Linking microbial processes to landscape-scale trace gas fluxes via hydrologic controls on soil chemistry in a forested Montana ecosystems (Dore (MSU), Gammons (MT-TECH), McDermott (MSU), McGlynn (MSU), Popp (U Hawaii-Manoa))

• The role of antecedent conditions on snow physics and cold-season ecosystem gas flux (Adams (MSU), Miller (MSU), Dore (MSU), Stoy (MSU), McGlynn (MSU))

• Water, carbon, and nitrogen dynamics in a floodplain riverscape: isotopic and sensor approaches to link biogeochemical cycles (Valett (UM), Payn (MSU), Brookshire (MSU), DeGrandpre (UM), Whalen (UNC))

• The genomics of beetle-fungal symbiosis with massive implications for forest disturbance ecology (McCutcheon (UM), Six (UM), Cripps (MSU))

Project abstracts here