View from the Emerald Lake overlook along the Flattop Mountain trail, Rocky Mountain National Park. Hallet Peak and the Flattop Crags dominate the right side of the photo. Captured March 25, 2001 by area resident Jim Disney (7 photographs used).
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Click here to view EPA Policy-relevance Project Summary

Gateway communities are concentrations of human population and commerce in close proximity to conservation areas. We propose to assess effects of changes in climate and land-use on Rocky Mountain National Park and its gateway community, Estes Park Colorado.

Estes Park Valley
Estes Park, Colorado gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park

 Specifically, our objectives are to:

  • Assess the potential consequences of changing land-use and climate for landscape structure, air and water quality, aquatic biota, terrestrial wildlife and native plant communities.
  • Extend these biotic effects to predict likely changes in visitation and the implications of those changes for the local economy.
  • Based on the understanding gained above, help stakeholders identify and evaluate potential ways to respond to a changing landscape and climatic context.
In gateway communities like Estes Park, natural processes are tightly linked to commerce by the behavior of Park visitors. To represent this link, we will investigate responses of visitors to direct effects of a changing climate (e.g., seasonal shifts in opening of roads and trails) as well as responses to indirect effects mediated by changes in the natural system (e.g., changes in wildlife populations, landscape structure, aquatic biota). Using human responses to mediate climate and land-use drivers, we will extend effects of climate change to the local economy.

The project will be organized in three phases. In Phase One, we will conduct a preliminary assessment dealing broadly with natural processes and human economic behavior. In Phase Two, we will assemble stakeholders to react to the preliminary assessment and to inform our science team about interventions that could exploit beneficial effects of climate change and ameliorate harmful ones. We have enlisted three partners, Rocky Mountain National Park, the Estes Valley Improvement Association, and the National Parks and Conservation Association to help organize the stakeholder assessment process. In Phase Three, we will use stakeholder input to focus the assessment on evaluating plausible alternatives for coping with climate change.

Our partners have committed from the outset to help us disseminate findings and, where appropriate, to incorporate those findings into advocacy, management, and policy. Thus, we are confident that the science we propose will achieve results by helping citizens, managers, and advocates anticipate and cope with effects of a changing climate.

Keywords: integrated assessment; climate change impacts; Rocky Mountain National Park area

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Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency under STAR grant no. R 827449-01-0.

Last updated November 19, 2002
Designed at the Natural Resource Ecology Lab, Colorado State University