Prairie Heating and CO₂ Enrichment (PHACE) Experiment

Native rangeland ecosystems occupy a large land area (over 250 Mha) in the United States.  These lands dominate the landscape and socioeconomic fabric of the western United States.  As extensive native ecosystems with limited management options (compared to more intensively-managed row-crop agriculture), they are particularly sensitive to climate change.  PHACE is a field experiment for subjecting a native mixed-grass prairie near Cheyenne, WY to elevated CO₂ and warming to determine how semi-arid grasslands will respond to global climate change over the next 50 years.  Such information is critical for developing innovative management options to deal with the impacts of global climate change on western rangelands. Customers of our research will include policy makers, state and federal agency land management professionals, and ultimately ranchers and the general public.  Some of the major project objectives of this project include:

1. Develop new knowledge of plant production, species change, and weed invasion responses to global change.
2. Determine how elevated CO₂ and warming affect nutrient and water dynamics. 
3. Determine the role of altered nutrient dynamics, plant metabolism and plant species changes on forage quality. 
4. Construct improved models for predicting long-term responses of semi-arid rangelands to global change and decision support systems to help ranchers and public land managers deal with the anticipated increased variation in weather.
5. Develop management practices to account for altered productivity and declining forage quality due to global change.
6. Enhance our understanding of rangeland contributions to  greenhouse gas emissions.

Collaborators: This project is a collaboration between the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS; Cheyenne, WY, Fort Collins, CO, Phoenix, AZ, USA), University of Wyoming, Colorado State University, the Institute for BioMeteorology (IBIMET, CNR, Italia), University of North Carolina, and University of Tasmania. See section VI below for a list of researchers. 

Information on Climate Change in Western Rangelands Symposium held in September 2008.

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