By changing the climate, humans have doubled the magnitude of drought’s impact on the availability of vegetation for herbivores, including livestock, to eat in the greater Four Corners region, according to a study published this summer in the journal Earth’s Future. This is because increasing air temperatures and increasing levels of evaporative demand – or more water being soaked up into the atmosphere – stresses the grasses and shrubs that livestock and many other herbivores rely upon. Emily Williams, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California Merced, was the lead author of the study. At the time, she was a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Barbara.