Reno Reporter

The pinyon-juniper woodlands are not only a great place for outdoor recreational activity, but they are home to an array of wildlife.

They are critical to maintaining a vital ecosystem by mitigating erosion by stabilizing storage, runoff and water disposal, and a new study by Robert Shriver with the University of Nevada, Reno sheds some light as to how these trees will survive in the future, according to a news release issued by the school.

“We found that four of the five species were declining,” Shriver, an assistant professor in the University’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology and Natural Resources, said in the release. “And, in the driest, warmest locations, up to about 50% of populations are declining. It’s pretty severe in those locations, which are usually at lower elevations that tend to be hotter and get less water than woodlands at higher elevations.”

There was one exception to study and that was the Utah juniper, which surprised Shriver because it matches the species’ resiliency.

“It’s the most abundant in the Great Basin and is typically less vulnerable to hotter, drier climate conditions, so it could mean that there might be compositional shifts occurring in the future, where some areas that are mixed species might become more juniper-dominated," said Shriver.

Shriver said that when looking at all the locations studied, which included over 6,000 plots and more than 59,000 tagged trees, he concluded that 10-20% of pinyon-juniper trees were diminishing.

According to Shriver: “They tag the trees and return to the same plots for comparison at least every 10 years, but they have a systematic scheme to determine where. They are making sure they are getting a broad sample of both federal and private land. The result is a representative sample of what all forests look like across the U.S., even covering some very remote locations. It’s staggered, with 10% of plots surveyed in a given year.”