Test tube in the desert

Saturday, Oct. 21, 2000 | 3:01 a.m.

Stan Smith and James Coleman step carefully along gravel paths carved into 200 acres of otherwise undisturbed desert on the Nevada Test Site. The trails wind among nine large circles of suspended PVC pipe that look as if they are part of an alien spacecraft landing zone.

The white pipe creates circles 70 feet around, hemming in the shrubs and brush, less than 50 miles southwest of the top-secret Area 51, where military aircraft have been tested for years.

Instead of luring cutting-edge craft with the circles, Smith and Coleman, scientists with UNLV and the Desert Research Institute, use the equipment to determine how desert plants react to carbon dioxide delivered through the piping onto grasses and cacti.

To avoid stepping inside the circles and disturbing their outdoor lab, Smith and Coleman perch on a platform that dissects each circle and peer through clear plastic tubes placed near the roots to watch what happens as the plants absorb the gas, the equivalent of oxygen to flora.

They are seeking clues to what might happen as the Earth's atmosphere heats up.

The work, which began three years ago, is an example of how the low-profile Desert Research Institute uses its unique position in the state to create cooperation among universities and other research institutions that might not otherwise work together.

This project has drawn experts on the desert environment from UNLV and the University of Nevada, Reno, and the results are gaining national attention. Preliminary conclusions are due to be published this fall in Nature, one of the world's most respected scientific journals.

Whether studying air pollution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, seasonal Southwest monsoons, how ground water behaves in arid lands or fragile desert landscapes, the Desert Research Institute has had a scientist involved somewhere in the world.

The institute is a nonprofit, statewide division of the University and Community College System, which has its own budget and its own president, equal in stature to those at UNLV and UNR.

That's a position that has caused consternation as well as cooperation, especially when higher education funding is debated in the Legislature.

DRI's two campuses -- in Las Vegas and Reno -- receive 10 percent of the universities' funds. In fiscal year 2000 that came to $5 million in state funds, to go along with $20 million raised from outside grants and private donations.

Unusual status

The DRI has the most unusual status of any research institution in the country, said Donald Baepler, who has served both as chancellor of the state university system and UNLV president. Most research institutes are part of a university and under its control.

There have been attempts to fold the DRI's projects and scientists into the state's universities, but it has succeeded in remaining independent, Baepler said.

In a state just developing a reputation for serious academics, DRI, since its founding in 1969, has quietly built expertise in arid lands, conducting both basic and applied environmental research on local, national and international scales, DRI President Stephen Wells said.

"I can't think of any institution better suited to do this kind of interdisciplinary science," Wells said. "Few places have the range of talents we have here."

About 400 full- and part-time scientists, technicians and support staff conduct some 140 research projects at DRI annually. About 85 percent of DRI's annual $23 million operating budget comes from research grants and contracts secured by scientists.

There are three research divisions within DRI, including atmospheric sciences, earth and ecosystems and hydrologic sciences. They use the state as their laboratory.

In the carbon dioxide research, Coleman, DRI's vice president for Research and Business Development, and UNLV biology professor Smith, are taking advantage of one of the only undisturbed landscapes in the country -- security restrictions at the Test Site have kept this patch of desert free of so much as a footprint.

It took only two days to see initial effects in the desert plants after the carbon dioxide was turned on at the site, called the Free Air C02 Enrichment, or FACE, Coleman said. But that does not mean a quick result from the research.

"The desert's fragile environment responds quicker than other ecosystems," Smith said. But the research is expected to continue for two decades, studying not only the plants, but also the soils and air that nourish them.

As part of the project, the scientists are asking questions such as what happens to desert watersheds if carbon dioxide levels rise, what the gas does in the soils and whether nitrogen will drop in the atmosphere and disrupt plant growth.

The carbon dioxide research has already revealed that grasses have thrived, edging out bigger and more stable plants, posing the potential of more and bigger brush fires as the climate warms and carbon dioxide increases in the overall atmosphere.

After this summer's devastating forest fires, DRI researchers in the field outside Nevada headed home to jump-start a fast-track study of range fires.

"It is so timely and important for Nevada and the rest of the country," said Chris Hagen, who is joining scientists from across the nation to explore the effects of wildfires and try to understand how to control them.

Scientists found that lightning is a major cause of wildfires in the West, said Timothy Brown of DRI's Reno campus, who heads the Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications Program.

Brown has charted the frequency of lightning strikes in Nevada and other Western states, building colorful maps on the DRI's website. Among the fires he has charted are two blazes sparked by lightning this summer that burned 3,000 acres in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas.

Firefighters deal with day-to-day weather conditions, but the DRI is looking at fire dangers 100 years from now, Brown said. By using real climate scenarios stored in a computer model, adding double the amount of carbon dioxide can show how and if the atmospheric gas affects fire dangers.

"My speculation is we are going to see increasing dangers from wildfires as the global climate changes," Brown said.

The scientists hope to combine technology and science to create better controlled burns and avoid a catastrophic blaze such as the one that scorched the area around the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where nuclear research is conducted, Hagen said.

DRI scientists are also working with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency to clear Lake Tahoe's waters in Northern Nevada.

In an another example of collaboration, the DRI has teamed up with the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, Calif., to try and predict future climatic changes.

Some of the DRI's work on climate helps to explain how Nevada can be dry one year and flooded the next.

David Mitchell is studying what happens when Gulf of California waters heat up. When warm enough, they produce a mass of moist air flow known as the Mexican monsoon, the kind of wet punch that produced the July 8, 1999, flood in the Las Vegas Valley, Mitchell said.

When he's not studying monsoons, Mitchell has turned his attention to a U.S. weather research program that studies the effects of air pollution on rain and snowfall.

Researchers have discovered that soot from forest fires in tropical jungles, as it drifts around the globe, interrupts rainfall, Mitchell said.

The soot particles prevent clouds from forming enough precipitation, adding to the worldwide spread of deserts.

"The clouds are simply not raining," he said.

At the Center for Arid Lands Environmental Management, the DRI designed its research program to build on three decades worth of Great Basin studies on archaeology, ground water resources, plant life, rodents and ants.

Center scientists led by Dr. David Mouat are hoping to help the Army strike a balance between preserving the natural habitat of its national training center at Fort Irwin in Southern California's desert, and the need to disturb the delicate desert surface to train troops.

Computer model

Mouat has created a computer model that predicts not only population growth in 10 to 30 years in the Fort Irwin area, but environmental impacts related to the changes in the desert Southwest.

But not all of the DRI's work is focused on the desert. Scientist Ken Taylor is conducting cutting-edge research on water clarity in another type of desert: He led a project on Antarctic ice cores gathered in Greenland.

Taylor's conclusions were published in Science magazine three times in the past decade, and the cores he collected are still under analysis by his assistant, Greg Lamorey, in Reno.

In the coldest or the hottest of environments, DRI scientists are working to put the pieces of a big scientific picture together. That picture drawn in a faraway field may affect the future of Las Vegas residents comfortable in their suburban homes.

"Elevated levels of carbon dioxide may affect how plants take up water, greatly impacting the availability of water to urban areas like Las Vegas and Reno," Coleman said of the research ongoing at the Test Site.

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