21st Century

A second thread is the long study of plant-pollinator interactions in the basin's meadows. Taxonomic work on flies and other anthophiles in the early 2000s reminded the field that bees are not the only story (Larson et al., 2001), while multi-year studies of single herb species documented just how variable pollination service is from year to year and place to place (Price et al., 2005). That tradition has continued into the 2020s with work showing how pollinators and seed predators jointly select on floral traits across a plant's life cycle (Campbell et al., 2021), and feeding into broader warnings about insect decline (Harvey et al., 2023).

A third thread follows the yellow-bellied marmots that have been mark-recaptured on the slopes above Gothic since the 1960s. In this century, that long record has been turned toward social network analysis (Wey et al., 2008), tests of hypotheses about why females remain near their natal burrows (Blumstein et al., 2009), and synthetic accounts of what fifty years of marmot watching reveal about the evolution of sociality (Blumstein, 2013); recent work has begun to question whether emergent social structure actually translates into survival benefits (Philson & Blumstein, 2023). A fourth, more recent thread is place-based: the East River watershed itself, treated as a single instrumented object (Hubbard et al., 2018), with its snow-fed groundwater and solute fluxes (Carroll et al., 2018) now anchoring questions about how mountain catchments process water, carbon, and nutrients.

Public engagement and policy context

For most of the 20th century, basin findings reached the public mainly through professional society proceedings and the occasional natural-history book. The 21st century has been different. From the mid-2000s onward, as phenology results began to show concrete consequences of climate change — wildflowers blooming earlier, frosts catching them out, pollinators arriving out of step — basin science moved into regional and then national press coverage. The 2008 work documenting frost damage to montane wildflowers (Inouye, 2008) was widely reported, and the meadows above Gothic became one of the recurring places that journalists visited to show readers what climate change looked like in a specific landscape. The reorientation around the East River watershed after 2016 brought a second wave of attention, this time tied to federal investment in mountain-system science and to questions about western water supply that matter directly to downstream cities and ranchers. Land-management relationships also shifted: collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and Department of Energy national laboratories became routine rather than occasional, and basin researchers increasingly appeared in policy briefings on pollinator decline, snowpack, and forest health. By the early 2020s, work like the documentation of plastic particles falling in protected areas (Brahney et al., 2020) was reaching audiences far outside ecology.

Defining contributions

From the pollination-consolidation phase, the taxonomic synthesis of flower-visiting flies (Larson et al., 2001) stands as a corrective to bee-centric views of pollination, and the seven-year study of pollination variation in a montane herb (Price et al., 2005) set a standard for how long one must actually watch a system to characterize it. The cross-biome synthesis of rain-use efficiency (Huxman et al., 2004), drawing on basin data among many others, became one of the most cited results of that period and helped establish how ecosystems convert precipitation into productivity.

From the phenology turn, the documentation of frost damage and floral decline under earlier snowmelt (Inouye, 2008) reframed climate change as something that could be measured wildflower by wildflower in a specific meadow, and the test of plasticity versus evolution in advancing flowering times (Anderson et al., 2012) answered a question that the descriptive work had made unavoidable. The plot-scale synthesis of tundra vegetation change (Elmendorf et al., 2012) and the review of community and ecosystem responses to elevational gradients (Sundqvist et al., 2013) placed basin findings inside global comparisons. The methodological paper on acoustic monitoring with microphone arrays (Blumstein et al., 2011) exported a basin-developed technique to terrestrial ecology broadly. From the watershed reorientation, the East River testbed description (Hubbard et al., 2018) and the analysis of seasonal groundwater and solute flux from snow-dominated basins (Carroll et al., 2018) together define what basin science means in the post-2016 phase. From the current integration phase, the open-access release of the TRY plant trait database (Kattge et al., 2020) and the global quantification of soil carbon losses under warming (Crowther et al., 2016) show how basin work now feeds directly into planetary-scale syntheses.

Threads still active

As of the mid-2020s, several threads are clearly carrying forward into the rest of the century. The phenology record around Gothic, now approaching half a century of continuous observation, continues to be the empirical backbone for questions about mismatch, plasticity, and adaptive evolution under climate change (Inouye, 2022). The marmot project's transition from describing social networks to testing their fitness consequences (Philson & Blumstein, 2023), together with new tools like universal DNA methylation clocks for estimating mammalian age (Lu et al., 2023), suggests the next phase of that work will weave behavioral, demographic, and molecular records together. The East River watershed testbed and the SAIL atmospheric campaign are now beginning to deliver coupled records that span from cloud microphysics to groundwater chemistry, and the basin's pollination tradition is being recast as part of a broader scientific warning on insect decline (Harvey et al., 2023). What the 21st century is bequeathing to its remaining decades is a basin no longer studied as a collection of organisms in a landscape, but as an integrated mountain system whose biology, hydrology, and atmosphere are increasingly understood as one problem.

References

Larson, B.M.H., Kevan, P.G., Inouye, D.W. (2001). Flies and flowers: taxonomic diversity of anthophiles and pollinators. (Larson et al., 2001)

Dunne, J.A., Harte, J., Taylor, K.J. (2003). Subalpine meadow flowering phenology responses to climate change: integrating experimental and gradient methods. (Dunne et al., 2003)

Wissinger, S.A., et al. (2003). Caddisfly life histories along permanence gradients in high-altitude wetlands in Colorado (U.S.A.). (Wissinger et al., 2003)

Huxman, T.E., et al. (2004). Convergence across biomes to a common rain-use efficiency. (Huxman et al., 2004)

Price, M.V., et al. (2005). Temporal and spatial variation in pollination of a montane herb: a seven-year study. (Price et al., 2005)

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

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

Wey, T., et al. (2008). Social network analysis of animal behaviour: a promising tool for the study of sociality. (Wey et al., 2008)

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

Blumstein, D.T., et al. (2011). Acoustic monitoring in terrestrial environments using microphone arrays: applications, technological considerations and prospectus. (Blumstein et al., 2011)

Anderson, J.T., et al. (2012). Phenotypic plasticity and adaptive evolution contribute to advancing flowering phenology in response to climate change. (Anderson et al., 2012)

Elmendorf, S.C., et al. (2012). Plot-scale evidence of tundra vegetation change and links to recent summer warming. (Elmendorf et al., 2012)

Blumstein, D.T. (2013). Yellow-bellied marmots: insights from an emergent view of sociality. (Blumstein, 2013)

Sundqvist, M.K., et al. (2013). Community and ecosystem responses to elevational gradients: processes, mechanisms, and insights for global change. (Sundqvist et al., 2013)

Crowther, T.W., et al. (2016). Quantifying global soil carbon losses in response to warming. (Crowther et al., 2016)

Carroll, R.W.H., et al. (2018). Factors controlling seasonal groundwater and solute flux from snow-dominated basins. (Carroll et al., 2018)

Hubbard, S.S., et al. (2018). The East River, Colorado, watershed: a mountainous community testbed for improving predictive understanding of multiscale hydrological-biogeochemical dynamics. (Hubbard et al., 2018)

Brahney, J., et al. (2020). Plastic rain in protected areas of the United States. (Brahney et al., 2020)

Kattge, J., et al. (2020). TRY plant trait database — enhanced coverage and open access. (Kattge et al., 2020)

Campbell, D.R., et al. (2021). Selection of floral traits by pollinators and seed predators during sequential life history stages. (Campbell et al., 2021)

Inouye, D.W. (2022). Climate change and phenology. (Inouye, 2022)

Harvey, J.A., et al. (2023). Scientists' warning on climate change and insects. (Harvey et al., 2023)

Lu, A.T., et al. (2023). Universal DNA methylation age across mammalian tissues. (Lu et al., 2023)

Philson, C.S., Blumstein, D.T. (2023). Emergent social structure is typically not associated with survival in a facultatively social mammal. (Philson & Blumstein, 2023)