BSI's first Executive Director, Lisa J. Graumlich, initiated a comprehensive program that sought to understand how climate variability and climate change impacted ecosystems in the Greater Yellowstone/Northern US Rockies region.  Utilizing time series of climate reconstructed from carefully collected and processed tree rings, Graumlich and her team increased our regional understanding of how ecosystems and earth surface processes interact with climate, particularly in terms of climate anomalies such as drought.