Research highlight: Dr. Keith Musselman and the EcoTram
Team members construct elevated track for the future EcoTram, July 2020.
High up in the subalpine forest of the Como Creek Watershed, in a landscape shaped by snow and wind, Boulder’s own Dr. Keith Musselman and collaborators have built one of the most ambitious and high-powered hydrological and ecological monitoring systems in the world. This system, a mobile, sensor-laden device called the EcoTram, offers novel insights into how mountain ecosystems are responding to climate change, snow loss, and shifting water availability.
Peter Blanken and Nic Tarasewicz work on the EcoTram in the Como Creek fen.
“We have meteorological stations, we have study plots where we make observations over time…I started wondering, what happens if we put one of these weather stations on a moving platform?”
-Dr. Keith Musselman
The system was built in 2023 and is coming up on the second year of full operation. The Mountain Research Station acts as a homebase for the EcoTram team, supporting their efforts through access to research laboratories, warm meals, and shelter from the harsh alpine environment.
The EcoTram is a raised-track, automated measurement system that traverses its 122 meter long track 2-3 times per hour. It carries various meteorological and hyperspectral imaging equipment used to capture data on local ecological gradients. While most ecological monitoring devices are only capable of capturing data on weather and climate, the EcoTram features powerful sensors that measure the electrical connectivity of the soil, allowing the researchers to quantify soil moisture and locate the water table. In doing so, Dr. Musselman and his team are able to take data “snapshots” of the landscape and determine how much water is available, how different environments are connected, and how this changes over time.
“The measurements at the MRS give us an opportunity to ask questions about the sensitivity and resilience of our local mountain ecosystems”
Dr. Musselman is particularly interested in identifying and studying alpine fens, high elevation groundwater-fed wetlands. Fens are important components of our local ecosystems in the Colorado Front Range as they provide stable water storage despite increasingly unpredictable weather conditions and climate strains. The fens that Musselman has found around the MRS are fed by melting snow that accumulates in the headwaters of the Como Creek.
The EcoTram is perfectly equipped to study these fens. Along its route, the tram traverses into the fens and then back into the dry, sub-alpine forest. These environments have a strong mosaic-like quality, so even though the EcoTram is traveling a relatively short distance, the sensors are able to identify clear geological and biological gradients. The continuous water and energy data is combined with observations on plant phenology, the timing of seasonal life-cycle events, to understand the impact fens have on water storage and plant community composition.
Over its first two years of operation, the EcoTram has provided researchers with a new understanding of how water and energy availability behave both on a daily basis and season-to-season. For example, EcoTram observations showed that water and energy availability vary strongly across short distances and through the growing season, with subsurface moisture extending from wetlands into adjacent forests and forest soils drying progressively over time.
Yet Musselman remains curious about how these gradients may change under various future climate change scenarios. This curiosity, in part, has been fueled by the work of Claire Parsons, a Master’s candidate at the University of Colorado, Denver. Parsons and her collaborators are studying paired plots at the MRS, some where snow is experimentally removed and others that are left undisturbed. Their team measures plant growth and tracks soil gas fluxes to evaluate how the land will respond to changing snowpack. Instead of finding greater climate stress in the snow-removed plots that simulate climate warming scenarios, as they suspected, they discovered that snow-covered sites were actually warmer in late winter and early spring, because the snowpack acts as an insulating layer. These observations prompted Dr. Musselman to wonder if the EcoTram could detect how soil temperature may be shifting along its transect, and how those patterns may connect to water and energy availability. These types of insights, emerging from other long-term studies at the MRS, are helping the EcoTram team develop a more complete picture of how mountain ecosystems might respond to future environmental change.
“It is somewhat a scientific melting pot at the MRS”
The EcoTram team is more than just Dr. Musselman. He is joined by a team of data modelers, engineers, ecologists, and geophysicists, whose expertise shapes the system’s design and application in different ways. According to Musselman, the collaborative environment at the MRS is central to this work. Researchers from different institutions and career stages come together to pursue their own projects, and many end up offering insights into the EcoTram that prove helpful. Of all the places that Dr. Musselman conducts his research, he notes some of his best thinking happens at the MRS.
Working at the MRS provides the EcoTram team with rare access to the transition between alpine tundra and sub-alpine forest, an ecologically crucial zone downstream of the mountain headwaters. Musselman emphasizes the importance of these headwaters and their surrounding habitats, which form the origin of freshwater resources that sustain front range communities such as Boulder. Initial data collection using the EcoTram suggests these ecosystems, which provide essential ecosystem services, may be more resilient to environmental change than originally thought. Still, Dr. Musselman stresses that this resilience only buys us limited time to translate scientific findings into effective policy.
Nic Tarasewicz hikes to the EcoTram in the early morning.
Nic Tarasewicz downloads data from a nearby meteorological station used as a reference for the EcoTram.
The EcoTram on a clear morning after a spring snowfall.
“Decision Making can be improved by engagement with scientists to place our local observations from the MRS into broader context, and when we do that successfully, that's when we start seeing science go into action”
Just like in any remote and harsh environment, conducting field work at the MRS can be challenging. Preparation is key, and the weather in the alpine can shift without warning. Yet Musselman notes that one of the biggest challenges of working on the EcoTram is rather unexpected and entirely unique: moose and elk frequently rub their antlers against the steel frame of the tracks, sometimes knocking them off of alignment. Each morning, field technicians begin their work by walking the full length of the tracks to check for signs of wildlife damage. Musselman doesn’t view this as too much of an inconvenience. In his view, the animals are the residents of the MRS. The researchers are merely visitors.
One of Dr. Musselman’s favorite terms is convergence. He strives to work across disciplines, bringing together hydrologists, engineers, ecologists and data scientists to address some of the most pressing ecological challenges of our time. Both the EcoTram, and the MRS more broadly exemplify this kind of scientific convergence. Addressing climate change is not only about protecting ecosystems, it is about mitigating the problems that climate change will enact on our communities and the ecosystem services we rely on. This makes Musselman’s research inherently interdisciplinary. The EcoTram team spends lots of time considering how to communicate their findings to stakeholders, policymakers, and the broader public, working to ensure that scientific insights can be relayed accurately to decision makers. For now, the EcoTram continues its measured journey back and forth across the sub-alpine forest, collecting data that Musselman and his team will transform into knowledge, and ultimately action.
Read more about the EcoTram: