climate change

U.S. Forest Service research indicates that climate change will affect habitat suitability for maple trees, threatening the multimillion dollar maple syrup industry. Changes in climate have already had an impact on the iconic sugar maple trees of the Northeastern U.S.

Flow of maple sap, which is boiled down to make syrup, is controlled by alternating freezing and thawing cycles in the late winter. Maple trees also rely on snowpack during this time to protect their roots from freezing.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

People often get confused when observed weather patterns run contrary to climate projections.  For instance, those living in the Mid-Atlantic States hear from experts that the region has now moved into a dry savanna-like climate zone, but yet two winters ago over 40 inches of snow fell in a single month.  But weather is highly variable regardless of the state of the climate.  Individual weather events like this one are different than "climate," which refers to long-term trends over decades.  And further, climate change could produce more extremes at both ends of the weather spectrum even while a region shifts into a seemingly contrary climate state.

In an attempt to make science and technical concepts of projecting climate change clearer to the public, the U.S. Forest Service has published a report simplifying complex information and resources.

A report being released by the U.S. Forest Service examines the impact of climate change on eight forest diseases and how these pathogens will ultimately affect Western forests.

The report analyzed a range of future conditions from warmer and dryer to warmer and wetter.  The first scenario, which is considered more likely for most regions in the West, includes dryer and hotter summers.  These conditions will increase the risk of wildfires and warmer winters allowing insect outbreaks, like the bark beetle, which has destroyed millions of pine trees in Colorado, to continue.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Recent warming of terrestrial climates combined with decreased stream flows has raised concerns about possible increases in stream temperatures in the Pacific continental United States. Loss of cold, clean water in the region has major implications for human use and for sensitive coldwater fishes, such as salmon and trout. In a joint project, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research (PNW) Station, and Oregon State University (OSU) researchers assessed the climate effects on cold water in low and high human-influenced sites using long-term stream temperature data from the USGS and the Forest Service.

The Forest Service recently unveiled a product that helps natural resource managers rapidly detect, identify and respond to unexpected changes in the nation's forests by using web-based tools.

The satellite-based monitoring and assessment tool aptly called ForWarn, recognizes and tracks potential forest disturbances caused by insects, diseases, wildfires, extreme weather, or other natural or human-caused events believed by many scientists to be caused in part by climate change.

USDA’s 2012 Agricultural Outlook Forum, Feb. 23-24, will present 25 breakout sessions, including three sessions focused on U.S. agriculture and the weather.  In the session Innovations to Minimize Crop Loss in a Changing Climate, Oregon State University will demonstrate their PRISM Spatial Climate Knowledge System which accounts for spatial variations in climate.  Speakers will be Christopher Daly, Director of the PRISM Climate Group and David Hannaway, Professor, Department of Crop and Soil Science, Oregon State University.  Rick Mueller, Head of the Spatial Analysis Research Section for USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, will also present a new analysis tool called Cropscape.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Understanding the causes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural landscapes is truly a multi-scale challenge, with GHG sources ranging from whole plant, to the microscopic microbe level.  For example, denitrification, the production of nitrous oxide, is the result of the action of just a few unique enzymes produced by a small number of bacteria and fungi in the soil.  These small players have huge importance because nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Increases in nitrous oxide and other GHGs have been implicated in major global changes such as increased mean annual temperatures, resulting in melting glaciers, increasing floods, and more frequent heat waves.

Knowing your forests and how climate change is affecting their health was the overarching theme on a recent Emerald Planet Inside Scoop program. David Cleaves, the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Advisor, was the sole guest on the hour long live broadcast that was simulcast on CSPAN and the Internet to more than 150 nations.

The show was divided into four segments which included Forest Service history and a wide range of information about the USDA land management agency’s Research and Development program. The last segment focused on the implementation of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Roadmap for Climate Change and its nationally recognized scorecard rating system.

Risk management doesn’t mean trying to address all risks in all ways, “riding off in all directions,” spending money, time, energy, and social capital trying to drive every risk we identify to zero. There is no shortage of risks to manage. But neither does it mean just “hunkering down,” waiting to see what happens. No-action can be the riskiest action of all. And it’s not a very good way to learn. To learn forward, you have to lean forward. As my grandfather told me, “You can’t steer that bicycle unless you get it moving.”

Risk management is useful for helping us to decide and to explain how we have decided what not to do as much as what to do. It doesn’t make the decisions any easier, but it can help us make tradeoffs and opportunities more clear and guide us to making the highest possible reduction across multiple risks. We will need all the help we can get in sorting through which risks to handle first and how far to go in reducing particular risks.