Yellowstone official working on plan for impact of climate change on park

Declining snowpack among many issues

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. — The question of how to respond to climate change doesn’t yield an easy answer.

Warming temperatures, decreasing snowpacks, longer fire seasons, disappearing food sources for animals. Each means something different, and dealing with them requires unwritten recipes, reported the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

“There’s really no cookbook, if you will, on responding to climate change,” said Jennifer Carpenter, the chief of the Yellowstone Center for Resources.

Carpenter wants to help write that cookbook — to whatever extent she can. After about a year and a half of serving as the acting chief of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, she was named to the post permanently. She oversees the science that comes out of the center’s six divisions. Sitting in her office at Mammoth Hot Springs earlier in August, she said they could do more to study climate change.

“Right now we’ve got a pretty small program in the park, and my intention is to grow that program so we can better meet the challenges of climate change in terms of what our response might be,” Carpenter said.

Climate change was named as one of the biggest challenges by several people who spoke at the National Park Service’s centennial celebration, including the agency’s director Jonathan Jarvis and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.

In Yellowstone, some work has been done, including a recent study to come out of the park that looked at the impact of declining snowpack on the users of over-snow vehicles like snowmobiles and snow coaches. It said that climate change has caused significant snowpack declines across the western part of the country in the last 50 years. Inside Yellowstone, the study said, annual peak snow and the number of days of snow cover were declining significantly.

Continued declines would diminish the opportunity for people to tour the park in the quiet of winter. The study even says that eventually it might make sense to plow roads “that experience the greatest snow losses.”

But aside from recreation, snowpack decline would have a real impact on water supply. Carpenter said the park and the overall ecosystem are unique in that two major river systems headed in opposite directions begin there — the Missouri and the Snake. What snowpacks will look like in the next several years are important for those systems and the people that use them, from anglers near the headwaters to irrigators miles and miles downstream.

“We are really becoming more aware of that and are concerned about it. What we do about it, I’m not exactly sure right now,” Carpenter said.

That’s a common story of climate change inside Yellowstone. Officials and scientists know there are impacts, but they want to know more before taking action.

Stephanie Adams, the Yellowstone program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that should be the case with grizzly bears, even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working toward removing Endangered Species Act protections from the bears.

“I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about how climate change could impact the bears,” Adams said.