Monica: The Yellowstone landscape remains one of my
absolute favorite places on the planet.
I feel like I've grown up with these trees.
I will say as a scientist, it has just been
an absolute privilege to be able to study this system.
But Yellowstone will change
and it's changing at a faster rate than
perhaps we had anticipated.
I started in Yellowstone as a ranger naturalist
at Old Faithful when I was 19 years old.
And that summer is why I chose to become an ecologist.
I've been studying the forests in Yellowstone for 35 years.
We started during and then right after the 1988 wildfires.
So Yellowstone and the ‘88 fires have given us
a benchmark for kind of what happens in the
historical — the “normal” — sorts of conditions.
Fire is very much a natural part of the forests in Yellowstone.
We know that fires have burned in this landscape
for the past 10,000 years at intervals
of about 100 to 300 years.
So historically, the forest regrows
and it's mature before it burns again.
Following the fires, you see just a carpet of tree seedlings
coming right back in in the first year.
It takes these forests almost 100 years
to recover from a previous fire.
As the climate is now getting warmer
and we're seeing drier conditions every summer,
the fire return interval is starting to change.
If the fires return before the trees
have had a chance to produce cones and have seeds,
these immature trees just don't have any seed source.
Even if the seeds are available,
with a warming climate the soils may be too hot
and too dry for the seedlings to germinate
and establish and grow successfully into big trees.
Many of those vast forests that we see
throughout the landscape, may disappear
and be replaced by non-forest vegetation.
The forests are really struggling now to establish and survive.
Hey, bear.
Heeeey, bear.
The climate seems to us to be changing at a faster rate
than the tree species are even able to adapt and keep up.
But what does that mean for the future of this landscape?
How is this iconic area going to change
as the 21st century unfolds?
So obviously we can't collect data
from a landscape that doesn't exist yet,
but we also can't wait 40 or 50 more years
to see what will happen.
Instead, we use computer models
which build on our years of past data
to explore how the future may unfold.
Specifically, to understand how the carbon emissions
that are changing the atmosphere will affect the climate and
the fire and the future of the Yellowstone landscape.
That gives us an idea of how
and where the landscape will change.
Some areas may transition actually away from forests
and into sagebrush or grassland or meadow.
That would mean less trees to provide shade
on the trails and along the rivers for hiking and fishing.
It would mean that the animal species who
rely on older forests will have less habitat.
The overall aesthetic of the park is also going to change
as the majestic old growth forests disappear.
Yellowstone is so well known,
it's the world's first national park.
It's a good place to both help people appreciate
the magnitude of climate change
and the potential changes that we'll see in the landscape.
And to do so in a place that people, they love.
One of my doctoral students, Timon Keller,
is using photographs that we can change based on
the results of our computer simulation models,
that have been well tested and validated for this region,
and translating those into pictures of landscapes
that people see as they visit the Tetons
and Yellowstone and the surrounding lands.
Timon: We've thought a lot about how we can
communicate this work effectively
and make sure that the results of the models
that we produce, are intuitive and easy
for people to understand as they're passing by.
And that's where those pictures come in.
Monica: It is really hard for people to visualize
a landscape that they haven't seen yet.
And to get people to understand the urgency
of how things may change.
So we hope that by depicting that we’ll help them understand
really what changes are likely to happen in the future.
Timon: This is just such a cool reminder that
the science that we do matters for people.
We want to engage people in that process
and share what we find to make people's lives better.
And I think that really is something
very special about this opportunity.
Monica: I know that places like Yellowstone
are going to still be beautiful.
There still going to be places that inspire us.
We know so many changes are coming.
They're not going to be the same as they were.
But I have hope in the next generation
of scientists and in our younger citizens.
So many of them have been inspired
by the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
and they really want to work hard to protect it.
We can implement policies to restore the atmosphere,
slow the rate of change and protect Yellowstone
and so many other natural areas and the resources
on which all of us depend.
Yellowstone is going to look different in the future,
but how different it will become depends on all of us.