Dr. Ye Zhang, a professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, has been awarded a $1 million grant by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to study how the forests of the Rocky Mountains recover after disturbances such as bark beetle infestations, drought, or fire.
The grant will support research conducted at Medicine Bow National Forest (MBNF), a 2.9-million-acre expanse that stretches across northern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming. The forest currently faces multiple environmental stressors.
“Under a changing climate, forests in the Rocky Mountains of North America are experiencing disturbances such as drought, insect outbreaks, and wildfire,” Zhang said. “It is important to understand how forests recover naturally to inform effective post-disturbance land and forest management practices.”
“After the 2020 Mullen fire in the Medicine Bow National Forest, which burned over trees that had been dead for more than a decade after bark beetle epidemic, tree regeneration was found to be patchy,” Zhang said. “Some burnt areas are fast regenerating while other areas are not.”
“The trees driving forest regeneration are not found everywhere, but rather are focused in areas of the forest we have nicknamed “forest refugia,” Zhang said.
Zhang’s research will specifically focus on those “forest refugia”, a concentration of trees that are responsible for driving forest regeneration after disturbances.
“Important forest refugia in Medicine Bow, and in the Rocky Mountains in general, are mountain wetlands with shallow water tables and high soil moisture,” Zhang said.
Zhang explained that many of these refugia are fed not by streams or snowmelt but by groundwater. Little is known about how these groundwater sources support wetlands, or what determines whether a groundwater source is suitable for seedlings.
“In this DOE project, we aim to map the locations of the wetlands in MBNF that actively support post-fire forest regeneration,” Zhang said.
This data will allow them to understand how and under what conditions groundwater drives forest recovery. They will also focus on identifying how droughts could impact these sources.
The grant will fund three Ph.D. students from the Geology and Geophysics and Botany departments, as well as a number of undergraduate field and laboratory assistants.
At the end of the project, the researchers will have a functional model that will allow them to project a range of climate scenarios for the region, helping drive decision making in how best to manage Rocky Mountain forests.
Zhang will collaborate with Dr. Andrew Parsekian, also a professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Dr. Brent Ewers, a professor in the Department of Botany. The computer modeling will be done by the lab of Dr. Xiaonan Tai, a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
