Droughts and Environmental Histories of Western North America

Tree-ring data are often used to reconstruct climate and ecological variations, streamflow, and even snowpack in centuries before instrumental records are available. Such data provide longer “windows” of natural variability into which water and forest managers can place recent variation, with a goal of better planning for future change. I briefly describe two examples of how tree-ring data are developed and used in water planning in the western US and forest management in Colorado. The first example is reconstructing streamflow from rivers in the central Rockies—the “water-towers” of the West—and how such information is used in defining severe droughts for water resource planning. The second example how fire histories inform forest restoration efforts, focusing on a collaborative forest landscape restoration project in the Front Range of Colorado.