THE FUTURE OF ECOSYSTEM REPORTING IN JACKSON HOLE: CLIMATE IS KEY

CARLYANN EDWARDS

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Dozens, if not hundreds, of sustainability reporting frameworks and guidelines exist today. These provide standards for the assessment and benchmarking between areas like green building and responsible business operations. However, few guidelines exist to serve the same purpose in our natural world.

Wildlife biologists to tourism experts have expressed the need for some sort of centralized body to establish indicators aligned between national, regional, and local public land managers, NGOs, and other interested parties in the area.

While a mountain town-specific set of indicators is ideal (encompassing surrounding public lands, of course), you pose the risk of oversimplifying things as no two ecosystems are alike. For the most part, the few indicators that are tracked by multiple parties fall into buckets like human/wildlife interactions, covering the number of vehicle-caused mortalities by species, or mitigation strategies like the percentage of critical habitat protected. Essentially, developing indicators that cross the boundaries of these for biological systems is complicated due to their natural variability and the challenge of interpreting results.

Jackson and Teton County’s joint Comprehensive Plan’s first Principle (1.1) is to “Maintain healthy populations of all native species.” Animals aside, Teton County is home to over 1,300 native plant species, according to Teton Conservation District.

It’s daunting to think about tracking all 1,300 native plants, as well as indicators related to wildlife, air, and water. Historically, our tactic as a community has been to monitor a few representative species, like the grizzly bear or yellow-billed cuckoo. Currently, the Teton County Long Range Planning website includes documents that could be considered indicator reports within a specific area.

For example, the Teton County Annual Indicator Report is tied to the Comprehensive Plan. Bridger Teton National Forest has its own set of indicators, while Grand Teton National Park publishes its annual Vital Signs Report. Then, NGOs like Teton Conservation District, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, and Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation collect a whole slew of data relevant and curated to their missions. policy-related indicators to tying indicators directly to specific goals identified in each Comprehensive Plan chapter. However, the updated plan has identified some indicators for development, part of which will be spearheaded by Tanya Anderson, the Town of Jackson’s Ecosystems Stewardship Administrator.

Anderson started the position in May. She mentioned that this area in particular is one of the five key components of her pages-long job description - and likely the portion that will take the longest and require the most collaboration.

“Essentially, developing indicators that cross the boundaries of these biological systems is complicated...”

The updated Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 2020, reevaluated what we tracked and reported annually. It also directed a shift from tracking Anderson explained that we also need to define our goals further. For example, principle 1.2 of the Comprehensive Plan is to “preserve

Chase Krumholz

and enhance surface water and groundwater quality,” which currently lacks additional details that need to be outlined on how we will measure and track that.

“Indicators need to be connected to a goal, and every community has different goals. Climate change might be the easiest thing if you say that everyone should have a goal of Net Zero by 2050 or something like that,” Anderson said. “In order to have unified indicators, there must be unified goals.”

Bryan Schuman, an Associate Professor of Paleohydrology, Paleoclimatology, and Paleoecology at the University of Wyoming, and one of the lead authors on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem Climate Change Assessment, is currently studying the ways we maintain ecosystem health and the human connections to the ecosystem in the context of a changing climate.

There are two different sides to the climate issue. One side we can think of is the stewardship component, which famously encompasses emissions. In other words, are we doing a good job of mitigating our impact on the climate? The other side is climate resilience, which grapples with the fact that we only have so much control over the global emissions that will shape our climate.

“We need to track and understand how the resources and ecosystems that we live in and care about are changing...”

“We need to track and understand how the resources and ecosystems that we live in and care about are changing, how we prepare for those changes and try to maintain as much of what we value those systems in as healthy of a state as possible,” Schuman said.

His team hopes to provide multiple scenarios that they can share broadly with the public, with the idea that

Frances Conner

people may be able to conceptualize and understand the consequences of what might change. Specific areas he thinks communities will be most interested in include the number of smoky days per year, the water reduction in Jackson Lake, and precipitation patterns.

“One of the outcomes I took away most from the Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment was the likelihood that we’re gonna see a major transition away from snow across the region,” Schuman said.

“The winter precipitation is much more likely to come as rain in the future, even up to 10,000 feet or higher. Understanding and tracking how fast that change is playing out and how severely that change is taking place is something that we need to stay on top of because it has consequences for everything from the water supply to those smoky days because it affects the likelihood of fire.” Schuman and his team have recognized the need for standardized climate reporting. As a result, they have identified it as a target for their future research, likely hosting workshops with communities in Northwest Wyoming as early as 2023.

“I think this is something that a lot of different people are trying to grapple with right now, but there’s not yet been anyone or any group or agency that has come forward,” he said.

While some efforts are underway to harmonize our data collection efforts, we have a long way to go. We can continue to build momentum by leveraging indicators that align with our community goals, including Jackson’s 2030 net zero resolution. As a community, we’ve consistently had to develop plans, goals, infrastructure, and representative indicators that are just as unique to our community as the landscape.

Carlyann Edwards is a Program Manager for the Riverwind Foundation. She moved to Jackson full-time after spending two seasons working seasonally in Yellowstone National Park. Before the Riverwind Foundation, she worked on the Climate and Sustainability Strategy Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers and covered Economic Indicators at Bloomberg. She graduated with distinction from UNC-Chapel Hill with a B.A. in Business Journalism and a B.A. in Environmental Studies while minoring in Music. In her free time, she enjoys connecting with the land through skiing, trail running, kayaking, and singing in Jackson Hole’s Community Choir.