A picture is worth a thousand plants: Using historic and repeat photography to quantify long-term change in drylands on the Colorado Plateau

This research utilizes over a century of historical and repeat photography on the Colorado Plateau to document long-term vegetation change on an iconic North American dryland landscape.Understanding long-term vegetation change can be used for predicting ecosystem level responses to change drivers but maintaining long-term ecological studies can be challenging.By analyzing 338 photo pairs from 1910 to 2016, our study reveals how three dominant plant communities respond to environmental factors over timescales rarely captured in ecological research.