Wildfires and Climate Change in Tropical Mountains

In 2012, after a period of prolonged warmth, a devastating high elevation fire broke out in the Rwenzori Mountains National Park, located on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Soon afterward, extreme precipitation led to deadly and damaging flooding which impacted communities at the base of the mountain. This fire broke previously held assumptions that high-elevation fires were improbable due to consistently cold and wet conditions. High elevation tropical mountains, like the Rwenzori, are important regions of biodiversity and endemism which are highly vulnerable to effects of climate change. 

Researchers at Brown led by Professor James Russell are studying the past to understand the impact of ongoing and future climate change on tropical mountain ecosystems.

Russell and his team are using lake sediment cores to investigate 12,000 years of climate and ecological history in the Rwenzori, including a warm period 5,000 years ago, to answer questions about the impacts of climate change on tropical mountains. This work has important implications for policy, land management, and tourist activities in a critically important ecosystem.  

“We are trying to use the most recent warm period in time in the past as analogue for the future.” – Professor James Russell

This project is an interdisciplinary effort with collaborators from Makerere University in Uganda, the Pennsylvania State University, Dartmouth College, Trinity College Dublin, and the Uganda Wildlife Authority. The researchers are collecting information from various proxies including organic biomarkers, pollen, charcoal, and glacial moraines. 

“This project takes a multidisciplinary multi-site approach to understand the impacts of climate on mountain ecosystems across elevations and time." –Andrea Mason