As California’s drought continues, researchers at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (JRBP) are observing wildlife under the unique set of conditions the drought presents.
“It is not like we are trying to prevent drought per se,” said Executive Director of JRBP Philippe Cohen. “We are mostly in the business of studying the interactive effects of drought.”
Cohen noted that although the effects of the drought are apparent, assessing the true effects of the drought will take time.
“[The preserve] is the driest I’ve ever seen. You can see it a lot in the plants and plenty of the animals,” Cohen said. “It is too soon to tell whether the impacts are long-term. There is certainly a short-term impact of drought stress.”
According to David Freyberg M.S. ’77 Ph.D. ’81, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, the effects of the drought will not become clear until the next growing season.
“One of the tricky things about the drought is that the impacts tend to be long-term,” Freyberg said. “With floods, you get wet; things get damaged right away. [With] droughts., it may take a long time because you may damage the vegetation, and that does not manifest itself until the plant starts trying to grow again.”
Freyberg added that the effects of the drought might not be entirely negative for vegetation.
“It is possible these conditions could be better for native plants – those that are adapted to the wet and dry patterns that have occurred over a longer time period in this part of California,” Freyberg said.
Despite the possible effects on vegetation, according to Cohen, the main concern for the preserve is the potential risk of forest fires.
“There our all kinds of ways in which [a forest fire] could happen – everything from the Fourth of July to if we do something stupid on the preserve,” Cohen said. “My suspicion is that if there were a fire here, it would most likely be caused by something off the preserve.”
Another indirect risk of the drought, according to Freyberg, is a potential disruption of the ecosystem.
“If Searsville Reservoir were to draw way down, then that has a potential to impact the preserve in that it exposes more lake bottom, and that lake bottom will be colonized by vegetation, and some of that vegetation could be invasive,” Freyberg said. “There are ways in which there could be a sort of third-hand impact.”
In addition, Freyberg said that California water regulations have had little effect on the preserve because the preserve uses a relatively small amount of water.
“The staff of the preserve is acutely aware that we are in a dry period, but the main water used on the preserve [is] simply [for] toilet flushing and drinking water – those kinds of uses,” Freyberg said.
Staff scientist in the global ecology department of Stanford’s Carnegie Institution for Science, Nona Chiariello has been observing the pressures that lack of water puts on plant life. She explained that the drought presents researchers with a chance to examine the Earth’s changing environment.
“To some extent those conditions are a window on a possible future climate in this area,” Chiariello said. “Because you don’t know, for example, whether there will be an increase in drought in California as a result of climate change. To some extent, we are viewing this in the context of the potential effects of climate change.”
Contact Sam Reamer at sreamer ‘at’ stanford.edu.