2006–10

The basin's other signature program — long-term study of yellow-bellied marmots at and around Gothic — pivoted hard toward social network analysis and integral projection models, both novel quantitative tools for asking how individual behavior and body condition translate into population-level fate. A methods paper laying out social network analysis as a tool for animal behavior research (Wey et al., 2008) accompanied empirical work showing that interactive females remained in their natal colonies (Blumstein et al., 2009) and that social cohesion arose through age and kin structure (Wey & Blumstein, 2010). A coupled model of body mass and population growth (Ozgul et al., 2010) demonstrated that warmer springs let marmots grow larger and reproduce more — an unusually optimistic climate-change result that drew wide notice. Related work examined heritability of vigilance and anti-predator traits (Blumstein et al., 2010), the acoustic structure of alarm calls (Blumstein & Recapet, 2009), and how predation risk shaped colony persistence (Blumstein et al., 2006).

A third current ran through plant-pollinator ecology and nutrient dynamics. Experiments enriching subalpine meadows with nitrogen tested whether atmospheric deposition was altering floral traits and pollination (Burkle & Irwin, 2010), a question echoed at landscape scale in work linking nitrogen deposition to shifting nutrient limitation in mountain lakes (Elser et al., 2009). Microbial ecology made its first prominent basin appearance with a study contrasting elevational diversity patterns of soil bacteria and plants on the slopes near Gothic (Bryant et al., 2008). Theory-minded work used basin meadows to develop a universal species-area curve scaling from plots to biomes (Harte et al., 2009). Distinctive plants of the era — Heliomeris multiflora, Heterotheca villosa, Delphinium barbeyi, Mertensia, and the bee genus Osmia — appeared repeatedly in these pollination and community studies, while study sites broadened beyond the Gothic core to include Snodgrass Mountain, Crystal, Marble, Tin Cup, Pitkin, and Curecanti National Recreation Area.

Community and policy context

With press coverage rising from a handful of stories to over a hundred, basin science became, for the first time, a sustained subject of public conversation. A national feature cluster in 2008 examined how growing visitor traffic was beginning to intersect with long-term research plots — an early version of a tension that would recur. National profile coverage in 2009 highlighted the multi-decade wildflower record and its climate implications, and the 2009 Senate subcommittee hearing on climate change in the national parks drew on basin phenology findings. A 2010 local story marked a roughly two-million-dollar federal grant to RMBL, reflecting the increased visibility of its long-term datasets.

Locally, the policy conversation ran on parallel tracks. County and regional documents took up sage-grouse habitat and livestock management (Management of Livestock Herbivory in Relationship to Sage-grouse Habitats and Populations, 2009), renewable energy and electric rates, and a Right to Float bill addressing river access (HB 1188, 2010). Sudden aspen decline and noxious weed management entered local press cycles, as did concerns about heavy snow loads and weather forecasting infrastructure. Basin science increasingly spoke to — and was spoken about within — these conversations, even when individual research projects sat at one remove from policy.

Emerging directions

Several threads visible in the era's leading work pointed forward. Integral projection models and social network analysis, both introduced into basin marmot research now (Wey et al., 2008; Ozgul et al., 2010), would become standard tools. Microsatellite genetics and acoustic localization expanded what could be measured about wild populations. Microbial elevational ecology (Bryant et al., 2008) opened a line of inquiry largely absent from basin work before. Remote sensing of spring phenology entered the conversation (White et al., 2009), complementing ground observations with continental coverage and presaging the satellite-and-plot integrations that would mature in the following decade. And nitrogen-enrichment experiments on whole pollination communities (Burkle & Irwin, 2010) extended a longstanding RMBL interest in nutrient limitation into the plant-pollinator interaction networks then becoming a major research front.

Landmark works

The era's clearest landmark — pivotal both globally and within the basin — is the long-term wildflower phenology synthesis (Inouye, 2008), which combined decades of meadow observation to show that earlier snowmelt could paradoxically increase frost damage to buds, and that flowering responses varied widely among species. It anchored a cascade of phenology papers that followed and remains among the most-cited products of basin research. Equally important within the basin's marmot program is the coupled body-mass and population-growth analysis (Ozgul et al., 2010), which used long-term individual records to show that warming had, at least so far, benefited a hibernating mammal — a counterintuitive result of broad significance. The methodological landmark of the era is the social network analysis primer (Wey et al., 2008), globally pivotal in spreading network thinking through animal behavior.

Three more works deserve naming. The phenology-and-demography synthesis (Miller-Rushing et al., 2010) and the broader phenology review (Forrest & Miller-Rushing, 2010) are globally pivotal syntheses that drew heavily on basin data. The universal species-area curve paper (Harte et al., 2009) extended basin meadow sampling into a globally framed scaling law. As basin-grounded landmarks — dense with local species and sites rather than highly cited externally — dissertations on avian malaria in an alpine ecosystem (Murdock, 2009) and on the effects of historical mine disturbance on pollination (Little, 2009) stand out for connecting basin natural history to disease and contamination questions newly relevant to land management. Long-term satellite snow-cover data (MODIS/Terra Snow Cover, 2006) provided a remote-sensing backbone widely used across these years.

Connections

The era inherited from 2001–05 a maturing portfolio of long-term plots — wildflower phenology, marmot demography, meadow plant communities — and turned them into a platform for climate-change synthesis at a moment when the wider scientific and policy world was hungry for exactly such records. What it carried forward were three durable shifts: phenology as a demographic question rather than a descriptive one, animal social behavior as a network problem, and basin field stations as natural laboratories whose multi-decade investments suddenly looked prescient.

REFERENCES

Blumstein, D.T. (2006). Developing an evolutionary ecology of fear: how life history and natural history traits affect disturbance tolerance in birds. (Blumstein, 2006)

Blumstein, D.T., Ozgul, A., Yovovich, V., Van Vuren, D.H., Armitage, K.B. (2006). Effect of predation risk on the presence and persistence of yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris) colonies. (Blumstein et al., 2006)

Blumstein, D.T., Wey, T.W., Tang, K. (2009). A test of the social cohesion hypothesis: interactive female marmots remain at home. (Blumstein et al., 2009)

Blumstein, D.T., Recapet, C. (2009). The sound of arousal: the addition of novel non-linearities increases responsiveness in marmot alarm calls. (Blumstein & Recapet, 2009)

Blumstein, D.T. et al. (2010). Heritability of anti-predatory traits: vigilance and locomotor performance in marmots. (Blumstein et al., 2010)

Bryant, J.A. et al. (2008). Microbes on mountainsides: contrasting elevational patterns of bacterial and plant diversity. (Bryant et al., 2008)

Burkle, L.A., Irwin, R.E. (2010). Beyond biomass: measuring the effects of community-level nitrogen enrichment on floral traits, pollinator visitation and plant reproduction. (Burkle & Irwin, 2010)

Elser, J.J. et al. (2009). Shifts in lake N:P stoichiometry and nutrient limitation driven by atmospheric nitrogen deposition. (Elser et al., 2009)

Forrest, J., Inouye, D.W., Thomson, J.D. (2010). Flowering phenology in subalpine meadows: does climate variation influence community co-flowering patterns? (Forrest et al., 2010)

Forrest, J., Miller-Rushing, A.J. (2010). Toward a synthetic understanding of the role of phenology in ecology and evolution. (Forrest & Miller-Rushing, 2010)

Forrest, J., Thomson, J.D. (2010). Consequences of variation in flowering time within and among individuals of Mertensia fusiformis (Boraginaceae), an early spring wildflower. (Forrest & Thomson, 2010)

Harte, J. et al. (2009). Biodiversity scales from plots to biomes with a universal species-area curve. (Harte et al., 2009)

Inouye, D.W. (2008). Effects of climate change on phenology, frost damage, and floral abundance of montane wildflowers. (Inouye, 2008)

Little, K. (2009). The effects of mine disturbance and contamination on pollination of subalpine wildflowers. (Little, 2009)

Miller-Rushing, A.J., Hoye, T.T., Inouye, D.W., Post, E. (2010). The effects of phenological mismatches on demography. (Miller-Rushing et al., 2010)

Murdock, C.C. (2009). Studies on the ecology of avian malaria in an alpine ecosystem. (Murdock, 2009)

Ozgul, A. et al. (2010). Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change. (Ozgul et al., 2010)

Thomson, J.D. (2010). Flowering phenology, fruiting success and progressive deterioration of pollination in an early-flowering geophyte. (Thomson, 2010)

Wey, T., Blumstein, D.T., Shen, W., Jordan, F. (2008). Social network analysis of animal behaviour: a promising tool for the study of sociality. (Wey et al., 2008)

Wey, T., Blumstein, D.T. (2010). Social cohesion in yellow-bellied marmots is established through age and kin structuring. (Wey & Blumstein, 2010)

White, M.A. et al. (2009). Intercomparison, interpretation, and assessment of spring phenology in North America estimated from remote sensing for 1982 to 2006. (White et al., 2009)

Management of Livestock Herbivory in Relationship to Sage-grouse Habitats and Populations (2009). Management of Livestock Herbivory in Relationship to Sage-grouse Habitats and Populations

Right to Float bill HB 1188 (2010). (Right to Float bill HB 1188)

MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500m, Version 5 (2006). MODIS/Terra Snow Cover 5-Min L2 Swath 500m, Version 5