Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The Earth's climate is constantly changing. Over the past three decades, global temperatures have increased at an unprecidented rate and this trend is expected to continue. Images from remote sensing satellites allow us to observe and monitor how climate change has been affecting the Earth. By observing how a particular ecosystem has been responding to changing climate conditions we can learn more about how these areas might react in the future. When we experience a particularly warm winter or unusually wet summer we are tempted to attribute it to climate change. In reality, however, the abnormal weather may just be a part of the natural variation inherent in climate. To help separate the significant changes from natural variations, climatologists have long used an averaging period of 30 years to define "normal" conditions to which the abnormal events are compared. While it may be instructive to learn that a period of unusual weather is statistically different than the climatological normal, this does not tell us what sort of real effect it is having, particularly on natural ecosystems. Thus it may be more informative to assess the importance of a climate variation by noting the magnitude of its environmental impact rather than just its atmospheric impact. In this research I develop a method to create an "environmental normal" that can be used to quantify where, when, and how big such environmental impacts are. The environmental normal, derived from a 30-year archive of remote sensing images, identifies the range of typical conditions that can be expected in an ecosystem. In this study I will create an environmental normal for the northern mixedgrass prairie ecoregion of the Great Plains of North America. This region is significant because less than one-quarter of Canada's original prairie remains but these grasslands are home to 70% of Canada's endangered species.