Resist, Accept, Direct: How Rocky Mountain National Park Is Managing Change

Three ways to respond to change

Park managers face mounting pressure. Climate change acts together with land use change, more visitors, pollution and nonnative species, pushing ecosystems and park infrastructure beyond their historical range — changes that are ever harder to hold back. The resist–accept–direct (RAD) framework helps managers make deliberate, strategic choices. It is simple and flexible, works alongside other climate adaptation approaches, and fits a wide range of decisions:

• Resist — keep existing conditions, or slow the change, based on historical or acceptable current conditions, often by intervening directly.
• Accept — let the system change without intervention.
• Direct — actively steer change toward a desired outcome, which may mean redesigning or repurposing a system for new conditions.

Why Rocky Mountain chose to resist

Some riparian ecosystems in Rocky Mountain National Park are declining under several stresses at once, including heavy browsing by elk and moose. Beavers, once plentiful, are gone from most of these areas, and water tables have dropped — too deep to support the tall willows that once sheltered them. A drier climate will make this worse.

Restored willow–beaver wetlands, though, can resist climate change on their own: they hold moisture that helps them withstand drought, support biodiversity, burn less readily and keep out invasive plants. They also trap sediment and nutrients — valued by communities and water managers downstream. So here, the park judges that resisting change will leave a more sustainable ecosystem.

Time is short: as the land dries and wildfires become more frequent, the chance of success shrinks. The park's existing Elk and Vegetation Management Plan addresses part of the problem, but more support and action would be needed to meet the goals at a meaningful scale.

The Kawuneeche Valley

The Kawuneeche Valley, on the park's west side, drains into the Colorado River. Once a lush willow–beaver wetland, it has turned into grassland with incised, eroding streams and plenty of invasive plants — a biome shift that some would call an ecosystem collapse.

Early results of a Colorado State University study confirmed and measured the change:

The Kawuneeche Valley Ecosystem Restoration Collaborative, formed in 2020, brings the park together with eight other agencies, local governments, organizations and institutions to tackle the change across the park, neighboring U.S. Forest Service land and private land downstream. It is weighing stream and wetland restoration projects to bring the valley back to a healthy willow–beaver wetland. More at the collaborative's website.

Accept: forests after the 2020 fires

Wildflowers among burned trees in Rocky Mountain National Park. NPS / Koren Nydick.

Wildfire is natural, but climate change is pushing forests into a new fire regime: subalpine forests in the Rockies, the park's included, now burn more often, and what grows back will face a warmer climate than the forests of centuries past. Land burned in the 2020 Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires, and in fires to come, may never return to the same kind of forest. The area is immense, much of it wilderness, so managers will likely have to accept most of the change and choose carefully where, if anywhere, to resist or direct it.

The park's Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) plans for the two fires propose only a few ways to resist:

• watching for and treating the spread of exotic plants in high-priority areas;
• replanting some burned limber pine stands;
• replanting willow, alder and birch burned inside fenced exclosures that keep out elk and moose.

These cover very little of the burn; the rest of the forests and wetlands will follow their own course. Meanwhile the park is working with research teams to document tree regeneration, amphibian and fish populations and water quality after the fires.

Direct: from lodgepole pine toward aspen

A fuel treatment in the park. NPS / Koren Nydick.

To cut wildfire risk near homes and developed areas (the wildland–urban interface), the park thins lodgepole pine forests and burns the resulting slash piles in winter, with snow on the ground. Lodgepole pine naturally burns in stand-replacing fires; thinning lowers fuel and helps firefighters, but it is no ecological stand-in for wildfire, and broadcast prescribed burning there is too risky.

One alternative is to direct the change: turn lodgepole pine toward aspen stands dotted with gaps and open meadows. Aspen stands are biodiversity hotspots, beautiful and good for ecotourism, and may burn less readily than lodgepole pine. But elk and moose browse young aspen heavily, so protecting new growth is hard. Under the Elk and Vegetation Management Plan, fenced exclosures were built about 10-12 years ago to restore willow and aspen; fuel treatments offer another way.

• Rapid Aspen Regeneration Assessment (RARA): begun in 2020 with a Colorado State University team. In three days, park staff and researchers surveyed aspen plots outside the exclosures, with a two-day survey planned for 2022, to learn how much aspen is regenerating and why it differs from place to place — guiding where fuel treatments can help aspen.
• Allenspark–Sandbeach Lake Fuel Treatment (2021): besides thinning lodgepole pine, it opened forest gaps and areas meant for aspen to spread. As an experiment, one area was shielded from elk and moose by a rock cliff on one side and a "fence" of slash piles around the rest, and the park's Fire Effects crew set up RARA-style plots inside and outside it to test whether removing conifers spurs aspen and whether the fence keeps browsers out.

Sources

Based on "Rocky Mountain National Park is taking action to resist, accept, and direct change," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. A partner's photograph is not reproduced.