News and Spotlights

On Wednesday, April 10, WWA will present an all-day workshop for water and forest resource managers to share what researchers know and don’t know about the potential water impacts from bark beetle infestations in lodgepole and spruce-fir forests in the Rocky Mountain West. We will also hear from local experts about the ongoing spruce beetle infestation in the San Juan headwaters. On the preceding evening (April 9) there will be a related community meeting and open house in Pagosa Springs. The Mountain Studies Institute (MSI), the San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership, the U.S. Forest Service, and Firewise of Southwest Colorado are partnering with WWA to convene the two events. See here for more information and registration.

Jeff Deems of CIRES and WWA, with colleagues from NASA JPL and CRREL, is monitoring mountain snowpack depth using a novel method that combines ground-based and airborne lidar. The goal is to improve water-supply inventories and forecasts in snowmelt-dominated watersheds. Deems received a 2012 CIRES Innovative Research Program grant to conduct the project, and the team finished collecting baseline data from snow-free mountain basins in Colorado and California last fall. They will collect measurements from snow-filled basins this March through July.

WWA's Kristen Averyt and James Meldrum, along with collaborators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Synapse Energy Economics, recently completed an analysis of 2008 water use by electric power plants. Their findings demonstrated that approximately 41% of freshwater withdrawals and 3% of freshwater consumption across the country is attributable to power generation, usually for cooling purposes. The paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, also showed significant discrepancies between water use data collected by the Energy Information Administration and calculations done for this analysis. Averyt et al.'s paper is available here.

National Geographic Daily News

After nearly 10 years serving as Director of the Western Water Assessment, Brad Udall is moving on to become Director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. (More information is available in this press release.) Please join us in congratulating Brad and thanking him for his service! Kristen Averyt will serve as WWA's Interim Director. As always, please contact us at wwa@colorado.edu with any questions or comments.

An author team that included WWA-sponsored researchers James McCutchan and Thomas Detmer concluded that, contrary to expectations, there has been no significant increase in stream nitrate concentrations following widespread pine beetle tree mortality in Colorado. The team's paper, published January 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), synthesized findings from several university and federal agency research studies, including the WWA project led by McCutchan. Read the CU-Boulder press release, the Green blog at the New York Times, and the full article at PNAS. Also see the WWA Beetles, Water, and Climate webpages.

NOAA recently announced seven multi-year awards to its RISA (Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments) programs to encourage collaboration with federal and non-federal partners on climate adaptation. WWA received $100,000 to connect the climate expertise at WWA and sister program CLIMAS (U. of Arizona) with regional conservation planners and decisionmakers, through The Nature Conservancy-led Southwest Climate Change Initiative (SWCCI). The effort is led by WWA team member Bill Travis. See the project description here.

Outside Magazine

The journal Ecology and Society recently published "Climate Change and Western Public Lands: A Survey of U.S. Federal Land Managers on the Status of Adaptation Efforts." This article summarizes and analyzes the results of a survey conducted by WWA team members Kellie Archie and Lisa Dilling, with Jana Milford and Fred Pampel of CU, on the status of climate adaptation efforts being undertaken by federal land managers in the WWA region. Read the full article at Ecology and Society.

The Summary for Decision Makers of the forthcoming report Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwestern United States is now available through the Southwest Climate Science Center. Several WWA team members contributed to the report, which provides a state-of-the-science overview of past, ongoing, and projected climate changes and impacts for the Southwest region, including Utah and Colorado. The full report will be published by Island Press in the near future.