Oct 30 2020

Beth Larry of the USDA Forest Service will give a presentation entitled, “Supporting climate action in the Northeast and Midwest: Forest Service research perspectives and priorities.” The Northern Research Station (NRS) is one of seven research stations of the USDA Forest Service that provide scientific information and decision tools to help land managers and communities practice sustainable stewardship of their lands and waterways. Based in the twenty-state region of the Northeast and North Central U.S., NRS scientists and staff conduct multi-disciplinary research with diverse partners and practitioners to address the nation’s most pressing forest conservation challenges. Understanding and adapting to climate change is a major emphasis – NRS is a consortium member of the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, hosts two USDA Climate Hubs, and leads the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science. This webinar will present the station’s climate science portfolio, current research priorities, and a number of promising efforts to help curb the impacts of climate change to water, land, and people. Read More >>

 

The uncertainty around future impacts of global environmental change on forests has led to a heightened focus on developing alternative management approaches to sustain critical ecosystems. Coauthored by NE CASC PI Anthony D’Amato, this article uses a spatially explicit forest landscape simulation model to examine and evaluate long-term effects of current and adaptive forest management under three projected climate scenarios within a Vermont forest. While it finds that land-use legacies and the inertia associated with long-term forest successional trajectories are likely to be the dominant on forest composition and density for the next 100 years, it also shows that climate will be a greater driver in these areas over the next 200 years.  Read More >> 

 

Massachusetts has witnessed numerous major floods and droughts over the past several decades. But what does the future hold for the state in terms of these hydrological extremes? To answer this question, a team including NE CASC researchers Ridwan Siddique, Ambarish Karmalkar, and Richard Palmer provide projections generated by high-resolution, physically-based hydrological models and multiple climate change scenarios in their new article published by the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies. Read More >>

 

A combination of factors--including climate change, overfishing, and the rise of imported seafood--have pressed the New England fishing industry into a vulnerable state. But the research of NE CASC fellow Amanda Davis suggests the industry may have cause for optimism. Her work concludes that abundant but relatively unfamiliar species could hold the key to reinvigorating regional fisheries. Read More >> 

 

An NE CASC team led by Adrian Jordaan, Daniel Pendleton, Chris Sutherland and Michelle Staudinger has completed its final report for a project that sought to better understand the responses of large migratory whales and other marine wildlife to climate change by examining species-specific shifts in timing of migration and habitat use. Their results are intended to inform management and conservation decisions about how to increasingly include information on species responses to climate change through shifts in phenology and distribution as part of marine spatial planning, fishery management, and protective actions such as seasonal management areas for endangered and listed species. Read More >> 

 

For more than two decades, the Southern Region of the USDA Forest Service has adhered to the Migrant and Landbird Conservation Strategy to address conservation concerns arising from long-term population declines among many bird species. To accomplish this objective, the Forest Service has conducted a regionwide program designed to improve monitoring, research, and management of avian populations and their habitats.  A team led by NE CASC principal investigators Thomas Bonnot and Frank Thompson has conducted the first comprehensive study analyzing the 26-year dataset generated by this program. Its results, which have been assembled in a new report, will help inform conservation and management efforts in the Southern Region. Read More >>

 

NE CASC has released its 2019 Annual Report, which highlights several of the center’s key activities of the past year. Read More >> 

 

NE CASC Undergraduate Fellow Jasmine Neosh, a student at the College of Menominee Nation, has published a personal essay that uses Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as a touchstone to explore the destructive politics underlying the purely negative representation of humanity’s relationship with the environment and the urgent need to recast that relationship in positive terms. Read More >> 

 

Our partners in the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe have requested assistance in locating a missing citizen. Please help spread the word. Read More >> 

 

Mass ECAN (Massachusetts Ecosystem Climate Adaptation Network) will host a free Zoom workshop addressing joint mitigation-adaptation at the beginning of December. Mass ECAN is a community of practice that works at the intersection of climate adaptation, ecosystem resilience and natural resources conservation. Their events provide an opportunity to connect and collaborate with peers working across the state and to collectively advance adaptation actions. This workshop will detail co-benefits for both carbon storage/sequestration and adaptation/resilience in different natural systems. Read More >>