Barsugli receives funding for wildlife, climate studies

Joseph Barsugli, research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU-Boulder, is one of several researchers who recently was awarded funding by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s North Central Climate Science Center in Fort Collins. Barsugli and others will share $400,000 in funding for new wildlife and climate studies.

His project, titled “Evaporation, Drought, and the Water Cycle Across Timescales,” will continue through 2017 and looks at evaporation, drought and the water cycle in the northern Rocky Mountains and Northern Great Plains.

According to the Interior’s website, the project “identifies and addresses climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and land managers in the North Central region. Drought is a dominant driver of ecological, economic, and social stress in the region, and is expected to be a major mode in which the impacts of climate change will be manifested in the region. The specific goal of this project is to improve the understanding of drought, and in particular to improve the climatic data (temperature, soil moisture, and other aspects of the water balance) that is being used to make projections of future ecological conditions in the regions. We will work to translate this scientific knowledge and data so that it is useful for land managers through the development of future drought scenarios that are supported by the quantitative data and tailored to the needs of the different landscapes within our region.”