Climate Change

Herald-Leader Article

12.01.2012

Tom Eblen, of the Lexington Herald-Leader has a good story about the state of Lexington’s urban forest.  My original report on the condition of our urban forest is here.

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An urban forest in peril

11.12.2012

Update:  Tom Eblen, Lexington Herald-Leader, has an excellent story on this subject in the December 2 newspaper. The urban forest of Lexington, KY is in serious decline as a result of extremely poor management. Large amounts of taxpayer money are spent to plant and maintain trees in Lexington’s parks and on its streets, but we [...]

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Maple sap flowing in Maine

03.01.2010

The annual maple sap flow has begun early in parts of Maine. According to the Bangor Daily News, mild day and night temperatures and a lack of snow is having a strong effect on Maine’s maple syrup industry.  The average start date for sap flow in Maine is March 20, with central Maine beginning March [...]

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US National Phenology Network helps track climate change, and you can help

12.10.2008

Phenology is the study of the timing of natural events. Phenology observers record the date and location of important seasonal events, such as bud burst, flowering, insect emergence and animal migration. Once a Victorian hobby, phenology has never been of much interest to Americans. The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) aims to change that by [...]

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Butterfly atlas shows species moving quickly north

12.07.2008

A new atlas of butterfly observations in Britain shows that several southern species are moving north quickly. The atlas, based on 40,000 observations made by a network of volunteers over 10 years shows that species adapted to northern climates are moving north or uphill, while more broadly distributed species are not changing their distribution. This [...]

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Five major threats to eastern North American forests

11.26.2008

The Big Five: emerald ash borer, Asian longhorned beetle, Sirex wood wasp, sudden oak death, hemlock woolly adelgid Forests in eastern North America are beset with a number of exotic pests and pathogens. Several of these pests and pathogens collectively could have a larger impact on eastern forests than chestnut blight, which killed billions of [...]

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Long-term CO2 forest experiment may end

11.11.2008

An experiment that pumps carbon dioxide into groups of trees growing outdoors, designed to test how forests will respond to global warming may be ended by the US Department of Energy. This is not a nefarious plot to squash the results of global warming research, but a genuine disagreement among two groups of scientists over [...]

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What does Thoreau tell us about climate change?

10.28.2008

Henry David Thoreau was an acute observer of the plants of Concord, Massachusetts and Walden Pond. He carefully recorded the abundance and phylogeny of plants in the area. Phylogeny refers to the timing of seasonal activities such as flowering.  Thoreau’s data provides information about species abundance and flowering time of the plants of Concord 150 [...]

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Meltdown: A global warming travelogue

10.06.2008

The American public has been slow to appreciate the slowly unfolding disaster known as global warming.  Until recently, it was hard to see the impacts of climate change. Not anymore.  In the last couple of years, pictures of melting glaciers, swimming polar bears and storm damage have become common.  It may be that the appearance [...]

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Look out, Oregon, for a global warming land rush

10.06.2008

What happens when global warming makes parts of the US uninhabitable, or less attractive as a place to live. It is likely that the southwestern US will become so dry and water so expensive that people will choose to live elsewhere. People currently living along coasts that become inundated by sea level rise and increasingly [...]

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