Program Summary
The Climate Change and Prairie Wetlands program began in the late 1980s with the doctoral work of Karen Poiani when she was a graduate student at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg under the direction of Professor W. Carter Johnson. Her graduate work was funded by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) for the specific purpose of developing a first-cut hydrology and vegetation dynamics model for semi-permanent wetlands (P1 and P4) at the Cottonwood Lake site in east-central North Dakota. Karen and Carter collaborated with Tom Winter (USGS) and George Swanson (NPWRC), and others at NPWRC, in producing the first version (1.0) of WETSIM (WETlandSIMulator).
From 1993-1996 the program was funded by a grant from EPA to continue wetland model development. As part of this new project, WETSIM version 2.0 was completed which led to a number of peer-reviewed publications in ecological and climate journals (see Publications section).
Another large grant was awarded to the program in 1999 by the USGS Biological Resource Division’s Global Change Program. New major collaborators included Glenn Guntenspergen (USGS), John Tracy and Rosemary Carroll (Desert Research Institute-Reno), and Tagir Gilmanov (SDSU). This project further developed and refined the WETSIM model (versions 3.0-3.2) to explore the effects of land-use and climate change interactions on wetland hydrology and vegetation dynamics and developed a new model of the wetland complex (WETLANDSCAPE—see For Scientists section), including simulation capacity for wetlands of all permanence types, not just semi-permanent wetlands simulated by WETSIM. During this project two doctoral dissertations were completed based on WETSIM (Millett 2004, Voldseth 2004). Additional peer-reviewed papers were produced from this research project (see Publications section), most notably the BioScience (2005) paper that has received considerable interest and attention from scientists, wetland managers, and the broadcast media (see Media section).
Currently, we have 3-yr. funding from the EPA STAR Grant program for a project “Non-Linear Responses of Prairie Pothole Landscapes to Climate Change and Land Management.” Our team of collaborators (see Research Team section) will use the WETLANDSCAPE model to inform the scientific and management community, and ultimately the public, of the existence of critical thresholds in the hydrologic environment of prairie wetlands, that if exceeded by future climate forcings, could produce major negative consequences for biodiversity. We will also provide new information on the economic feasibility of alternative land use options and indicate the magnitude of required societal costs to achieve such outcomes.
