I've always encouraged them to compare used areas with unused areas, for example. Most parks have areas that are much more used—by the public—than other areas and so they can compare those areas. We are lucky at Canyonlands and Arches because we have areas, actually, that have never been grazed by livestock and are almost never visited by humans, so we have a pretty good idea of what is just regional change versus what is direct-visitation change. We have been measuring vegetation for 20 years, so we can also use that to say, "Wow, we are losing grasses," for instance—which we are—and say, "Okay, parks, you know, you are losing grasses, and you're losing grasses in areas that have never been grazed and are not visited by people, and you're losing that lichen, Collema, in an area that has never been grazed and has never been visited by people. So if you see it happening in areas where there's a lot of people it's not a result of management.” It also makes the parks incredibly valuable as a comparison for more utilized landscapes, like the Bureau of Land Management lands, because we can now distinguish between what's climate change and what's land use. A Let me give one example: I always assumed that the reason that they were losing their lichens and grasses was because of grazing and, you know, frankly, I was wrong. I think they've hastened it but they haven't created it, per se.
Finally, a vitally important question: Why do desert flowers bloom after rains?
When you do have a wet year then you have large flushes of annual plants, so, yes, moisture is important, but it's not just moisture. It's also crust. When you have a long time between wet years, you have a lot of nutrient buildup in the soils, and that nutrient buildup is due these organisms. They are activated by tiny, tiny rain events, like one millimeter will turn 'em on and they'll fix nitrogen and they'll fix carbon. So when it rains there's a huge flush of nutrients.
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Add Comment"With a shifting, moving sand dune, there's hardly gonna be anything"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGonna? Seriously, 'gonna'? What is this Facebook or a blog?
i ain't gonna reed sietifik amerikn ane mor
This is a good example of man-made environmental change which has nothing to do with CO2, but it is still very plausible. Like how the Sahara became a desert between -20000 and -10000 ago, according to evidence in rock drawings in southern Libya. On the oldest pictures rhinoceroses can be seen, whereas on the younger ones only house animals like sheep appear. The drying-up of this area may well be due to the explosion of farming, burning down forests to clear the land, which became quickly exhausted since there was no recurring fertilizing like in the Nile valley. By the way, the accelerated melting of glaciers in Greenland may also be due to carbon soot from the engines of the multitude of planes on the Atlantic route between Europe and the USA.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Dr. Belknap,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother way to prevent dust in some areas would be by raising the water table in order to create savanna out of desert.
I see no reason why many climate water problems can not be much ameliorated by intelligent management of water both before and after the water reaches the soil, including pumping it into water tables through large, clean gravel filled deep holes. Rhode Island pumps whole rivers into the ocean during a flood, so the pumps already exist. I suspect that such a technique could be used to flush salt or poisons out of ground water also if designed right.
Our management of water is very important. There is no reason why we should allow huge volumes of water to flop down and flow unimpeded across farms down stream, destroying them and then into the ocean, while adjacent areas shrivel up by drought. There are huge pumps that can easily prevent this. Allowing river water to flow into the ocean from any country relying on ground water is not very intelligent either. See a short discussion inside the URL http://charles_w.tripod.com/climate.html .
Sincerely, Charles Weber