A new airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) system will be built to enable future interdisciplinary ecological and environmental research involving optical measurements of fish, plankton, water turbidity, and related quantities in lakes and rivers.
The goal of this work is to develop and implement tools to conduct vulnerability assessments of ecological response to climate and land use change at spatial scales relevant to human adaptation to these changes.
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.
The Historical Legacies group is a multi-institutional partnership that uses paleoenvironmental information preserved in tree rings, lake-sediments, archeological and other records to reconstruct climate, vegetation and disturbance history.
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.
This project compares the impacts of invasive pines in the southern hemisphere, where no pines are native, to the impacts of pines in the northern hemisphere where pines are native and widespread.
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.
Integration: Create statewide scenarios of past, present and future landscape‐level climate change by improving current downscaled GCM and regional climate model output
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 project uses cutting edge techniques to investigate host-pathogen interactions in honey bees. Honey bees are essential pollinators of numerous crops, thus recent increased annual losses of honey bee colonies is a risk to agricultural production
This reseearch area investigates mainly how vegetation dynamics have responded to global change at regional to global scales using dynamic global vegetation models.
The IoE, representing both The University of Montana and Montana State University, is a university consortium member of the North Central Climate Science Center. The North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) is part of a network of eight CSCs created to provide scientific information, tools, and techniques that managers and other parties interested in land, water, wildlife and cultural resources can use to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to climate change.
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))
Seasonality and sources of recharge water to the Nyack floodplain in relation to rates of biogeochemical processes and ecosystem function (Parker (MT-TECH), Gammons (MT-TECH), Valett (UM), Poole (MSU), Izurieta (MSU))
The sound of rivers (Lorang (UM), Maher (MSU), Philp (TerraEchos Inc))
Tree responses to drought: carbon reserves and associated trade-offs (Sala (UM), H. Thompson (UM), Kolb (UM))
Does watershed topography drive the response of terrestrial-aquatic ecosystems to disturbance? (_____)
Long-term water balance and nitrate biogeochemistry in cultivated alluvial landscapes of central Montana (Ewing (MSU), G. Shaw (MT-TECH), Brookshire (MSU), Gammons (MT-TECH), Jones (MSU), Stoy (MSU))
Controls on productivity and biogeochemical cycling in sub-alpine grasslands of the Northern Rocky Mountains (Brookshire (MSU), Ewing (MSU), Stoy (MSU), Weaver (MSU))
Climate change vulnerability and adaptive capacity in Montana: Using multi-scaled, iterative scenario-building and social network analysis to investigate community decision-making under uncertainty (Yung (UM), Murphy (UM), Cleveland (UM), Dobrowski (UM), Eby (UM), Lachapelle (MSU), Shanahan (MSU))
Montana Anthropogenic Research Cooperative (MARC) project (______)
Drivers of forest structure and function on tribal lands of northwestern Montana: Interactions among climate, disturbance, ecosystem legacies and management (McWethy (MSU), Leighton (SKCC), Nelson (UM), Pederson (USGS), Heyerdahl (USFS))
Projecting climate change in Pacific Rim rivers: landscape scale influences on salmonid vulnerability using satellite remote sensing and genomics (Luikart (UM), Kimball (UM), Stanford (UM), Duffield (UM), Landguth (UM), Poole (MSU), Payn (MSU), Izurieta (MSU), Madsen (CDKCC), Muhlfeld (USGS), Boyer (MT FWP))
Direct and indirect responses to herbivory in semi-arid ecosystems: indicators of vulnerability to climate and land-use changes in the High Plains region of Montana (Litt (MSU), Callaway (UM), Dobrowski (UM))
Landscape systems and environmental change in Western Montana: a multidisciplinary approach to hydrology, ecology, and economics ( Maneta (UM), Crabtree (UM), Kellenberg (UM), Marshall (MSU), Hebblewhite (UM), Kimball (UM))
Identifying the factors and interactions that drive agroecosystems over sustainability thresholds (Maxwell (MSU), Bekkerman (MSU), Rew (MSU), Barroso (MSU), Belsky (UM))
Examining risk and resilience in the Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems: ecological, social, and ethical dimensions of water governance under conditions of climate change ( Dunkel (MSU), Halvorson (UM), Broberg (UM), Montagne (MSU), Almquist (UM), S. Thompson (UM), Scott (UM), Lyle (ProjectWET), Muhlfeld (USGS), Madsen (CDKCC), McKay (BCC))