UW Scientist Receives Early-Career Grant to Study Local Plant Communities, Facilitate Public Outreach

Lauren Shoemaker, an associate professor in the University of Wyoming’s botany department, has received a five-year, $875,000 National Science Foundation grant to study how plant communities in Wyoming and northern Colorado respond to warming temperatures.

portrait of smiling woman — Lauren Shoemaker, associate professor of botany.

The grant is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which emphasizes the integration of research and education. For Shoemaker, that means incorporating learning opportunities for K-12 students, UW students, and members of the public into her study.

“Lauren Shoemaker’s NSF CAREER award recognizes both the excellence and creativity of her ecological research and her ability to directly connect that work with teaching and mentoring,” says Brent Ewers, head of the botany department. “This award affirms her groundbreaking potential to shape the future of ecology and stands as further evidence of the botany department’s excellence in research, teaching and outreach.”

The first component of Shoemaker’s CAREER project involves an in-depth study of how environmental changes and interactions between plant species affect alpine plant communities at Colorado’s Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) site.

Previous studies have focused primarily on environmental factors like changes in temperature, snowpack, or atmospheric nitrogen levels. Shoemaker’s research expands upon this work to examine how different plant species facilitate—or inhibit—other plants’ survival.

Disentangling these factors is especially important in alpine environments, where warming temperatures may shift a particular species’ range to higher elevations, creating new plant communities. To mimic increased temperatures, the Niwot Ridge study will utilize open-top plexiglass warming chambers, which create a greenhouse-like effect.

To further understand the effects of warming and species interactions, Shoemaker’s team will move “turfs” of established plant communities to different elevations and into different climate regimes.

plexiglas growth chambers containing yellow flowers in a grassy alpine mealow with mountains and blue sky with clouds in the background — A plant’s-eye view of plots surrounded by chambers made of plexiglass that warm the plots by refracting sunlight. Photo by Megan Szojka.

In collaboration with local partners, Shoemaker will also establish a network of regional study sites equipped with warming chambers. Dubbed the Wyoming Colorado (WyoCo) Warming Network, this component of the project involves the installation and monitoring of warming chambers at five sites open to the public.

In Wyoming, warming chambers will be placed at the Pilot Hill Recreation Area in Laramie and at the James C. Hageman Sustainable Agriculture Research and Extension Center near Lingle. Colorado sites include the Cal-Wood Education Center in Jamestown and the Mountain Research Station in Nederland as well as Niwot Ridge, which is located outside Boulder.

While simple in design, WyoCo warming chambers will provide key opportunities for both data collection and education. Shoemaker and her partners hope to engage stakeholders of all ages—K-12 students, local recreationists, and community members—in addition to facilitating learning opportunities for UW students.

“I think it’s really important to understand the effects of warming on your own local ecosystems,” Shoemaker comments. “We can easily observe changes in our local ecosystems after large disturbances, such as fire. Tracking more subtle changes, such as [those] due to warming, is more challenging. The warming chambers will allow us to observe predicted future changes in our plant communities, comparing to current conditions and even comparing potential warming effects across the five WyoCo Warming sites.”

Warming temperatures might be associated with the expansion of cheatgrass populations in some areas, for example, but in other cases may facilitate the growth of native wildflowers. The WyoCo network provides an opportunity to “understand big-picture patterns of changes through time across these different ecosystems,” Shoemaker explains.

Ultimately, she and her collaborators will create lesson plans for elementary and high school students, an educational website, and an animated video to complement educational signs and programs at each site.

Data from the five WyoCo sites will be analyzed in a new community ecology course at UW taught by Shoemaker. In addition to collecting and analyzing data, students will create reports for participating sites and present their work to key stakeholders and managers, such as the Pilot Hill Board of Directors.

To learn more about the project, contact Shoemaker at lshoema1@uwyo.edu.