What remains of the stunning shortgrass prairie of eastern Colorado is at even more risk of die-off than previously thought, threatened by increasingly common extreme droughts. The same fate awaits many of the world’s pastures and shrublands, but the impact could be worse in Colorado because shortgrass prairies exist in drier environments. That’s according to a newly published research paper that for the first time has modeled the impact of extreme droughts on different grass and shrublands across the globe. … Deep droughts in the past have only occurred every 100 years or so. That rarity has made them difficult to study. So the researchers, using historic records, found old sites on six continents that had experienced an extreme one-year drought. They then built special structures to apply water, mimicking rainfall. On roughly half of the sites extreme drought conditions were created and analyzed, while others created less extreme drought conditions.

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