New Photos Added in the Technical Overview Pages

High Plains Global Change Experiment (HPGCE)

Native rangeland ecosystems occupy a large land area (over 250 Mha) in the U.S.  These lands dominate the landscape and socioeconomic fabric of the western United States.  As extensively managed native ecosystems with limited management options (compared to more intensively-managed row-crop agriculture), they are particularly sensitive to the vagaries of climate.  Rangelands are expected to be strongly affected by global climate change, although little research has been done to verify these predictions.  The High Plains Global Change Experiment is a field experiment for subjecting native mixed-grass prairie near Cheyenne, WY to elevated CO2 and warming for understanding how this important grassland of the northern and central Great Plains will respond to global change over the next 50 years.  Such information is critical for developing innovative management options to deal with the impacts of global change on western rangelands, as well as for developing practices for mitigating atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions of the western United States.  Customers of our research will include policy makers, state and federal agency land management professionals, and ultimately ranchers and the general public.  Some of the major project objectives of this project include:   
 
  1. Develop new knowledge of plant production, species change, and weed invasion response to global change.
  2. Determine how elevated CO2 and warming affect nutrient and water dynamics. 
  3. Determine the role of altered nutrient dynamics, plant metabolism and plant species changes on forage quality. 
  4. Construct improved models for predicting long-term responses of semi-arid rangelands to global change and decision support systems to help ranchers and public land managers deal with the anticipated increased variation in weather.
  5. Develop management practices to account for altered productivity and declining forage quality due to global change.
  6. Develop management strategies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

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Collaborators: This project is a collaboration between the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS; Cheyenne, WY, Fort Collins, CO, Phoenix, AZ, USA), University of Wyoming, the Institute for BioMeteorology (IBIMET, CNR, Italia), University of North Carolina, and Colorado State University. See section VI below for a list of researchers.  (put institutional icons at bottom of this page, including institutions like DOE when grants are funded)

 

Telephone
970-492-7121
FAX
970-492-7160
Postal address
1701 Centre Ave  Fort Collins, CO 80525
Electronic mail
General Information: Jack.Morgan@ars.usda.gov
Webmaster: John.Lambert@ars.usda.gov