Simulating Climate Change: Take a Walk in a Forest of the Future

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What will the future feel like in our forests? In six plots at the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research Site in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the trees already know. Dr. Pamela Templer has created a robust simulation of the climate—warmer summer temperatures and later snowfall—that these forests will experience within the century…. Read more »

ESA By Topic: Presentations on the Ecological Impacts of Saltwater Inundation

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The IPCC projects that, even if humans succeed in keeping temperatures below the 2°C target set in Paris, sea level will rise 0.28 to 0.61 m this century. With this amount of sea level rise, salt water pulses from high tide floods and storm surges will become ever-more common in coastal ecosystems. Multiple LTER sites are running experiments… Read more »

The making of an ice storm

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Ice storms are powerfully disruptive to northeastern forests, but truly understanding their dynamics has proved challenging because they strike with little warning. Hubbard Brook LTER scientists took the matter into their own hands by creating an ice storm of their own making. The experiment, which was covered by NSF360 and Science Now, is allowing them… Read more »

Study: Forest clearcuts show sustained losses of carbon, surprising trends in water

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PETERSHAM, Mass.—A new study out of the Harvard Forest, released today in the journal Global Change Biology, is the first detailed account of how carbon, water, and energy balances shift in the three years following the clearcut of a deciduous forest. The study, conducted by Clark University Professor Christopher Williams and colleagues in a 20-acre… Read more »

In blown down forests, a story of survival

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Contact: Clarisse Hart, Harvard Forest Outreach Manager Telephone: (978) 756-6157 (9a to 5p) Email: hart3@fas.harvard.edu October 16, 2012 PETERSHAM, MASSACHUSETTS—In newscasts following intense wind and ice storms, damaged trees stand out: snapped limbs, uprooted trunks, sometimes entire forests blown nearly flat. In the storm’s wake, landowners, municipalities, and state agencies are faced with important financial… Read more »

Long-term research reveals causes and consequences of environmental change

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WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 6, 2012—As global temperatures rise, the most threatened ecosystems are those that depend on a season of snow and ice, scientists from the nation’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network say.”The vulnerability of cool, wet areas to climate change is striking,” says Julia Jones, a lead author in a special issue of the journal BioScience released today featuring results from more than 30 years of LTER, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

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