Botany department's research scientist Jane Zelikova and professors Dave Williams and Elise Pendall along with scientists from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) studied the effect of elevated CO2 and warming on grassland vegetation which will provide insights that Wyoming ranchers and land managers need to make grassland ecosystems more resistant to wide fluctuations in rainfall and temperatures. Under elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations, they found that "grasslands changed from being dominated by two very common species now (western wheatgrass, an intermediate grass, and blue grama, a short grass) toward other gramonoids and forbs that aren't as dominant now". These findings, commented Dave Williams, "will help us refine models used to predict how our grasslands will function and function 100 years from now".
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| Graduate students Amanda Brennan and Jennifer Bell in the field |
These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious multi-disciplinary journal on Oct 13, 2014 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414659111)
Link to Dr. Zelikova's web page - click here
Link to Dr. Williams's Lab web page - click here
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