Environmental Project

Report examines impacts of climate change on drought, vegetation in Four Corners area
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By changing the climate, humans have doubled the magnitude of drought’s impact on the availability of vegetation for herbivores, including livestock, to eat in the greater Four Corners region, according to a study published this summer in the journal Earth’s Future. This is because increasing air temperatures and increasing levels of evaporative demand—or more water being soaked up into the atmosphere—stresses the grasses and shrubs that livestock and many other herbivores rely upon. Emily Williams, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California Merced, was the lead author of the study. At the time, she was a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Barbara. She has a personal connection to the Southwest, as her grandparents once lived in Arizona.
“As a kid, I would go to the Southwest quite a bit and really fell in love with the desert landscape,” she said.
But that wasn’t the only reason Williams chose to look into how climate change could be impacting the vegetation in the greater Four Corners region.