By Paris Edwards, Haley Case-Scott, and Holly R. Prendeville, USDA Northwest Climate Hub Whether you are reading the news or talking with your community, the number of stories about how climate change and its impacts affect daily life and business across the Northwest, the United States, and the world is growing. Recently, there have been […]
By Sonia A. Hall There is a difference between the amount of water diverted from streams and rivers to irrigate crops, and the amount of water consumptively used in those irrigated fields, which includes what the crops actually transpire, plus what evaporates from these fields. The difference is sometimes called return flow, as it percolates […]
By Antoinette Avorgbedo, Intern at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center and the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources Did you know that people indigenous to the hotter equatorial regions have much lower sweat rates than people in cooler regions of the world? Similar to the ability of the human body […]
By Chris Schnepf Foresters were among the first to start thinking about the possible effects of climate change, in part because of the long-term nature of forests—foresters commonly reflect on management issues on 50 or even 150-year time scales. Because forests are also highly valued for other benefits in addition to commodity production (i.e., wood), […]
By Gabrielle Roesch-McNally Climate change is expected to increase the vulnerability of our agriculture and natural resource systems. In the face of more extreme and variable weather, there are a suite of soil health management practices that land managers can adopt to build greater resilience and to reduce risks in their agricultural operations (examples of […]
By Laurie Houston If you live in the Northwest, you either experienced first-hand or certainly heard about this past week’s blizzard in eastern Washington State. This area does not usually get much precipitation over the course of a year. During the winter, they may typically get a few inches of snow in any given storm. […]
By Gabrielle Roesch-McNally USDA SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education) recently published a new resource for land managers and those who advise them titled, “Cultivating Climate Resilience on Farms and Ranches.” This resource outlines some of the challenges that farmers and ranchers will face as climate change leads to more extreme and variable weather. While […]
By Chris Schnepf It was impossible to watch all the media coverage of the California fires last year, with many homes and forests burning, and not be moved. When large destructive fires like this hit, people have a natural desire to put some meaning to it. A variety of voices spoke of the changes in […]
By Jordan Jobe, Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, Washington State University In the Puget Sound Region, it’s clear that climate change impacts will involve changes in precipitation that will impact agriculture, especially agriculture in floodplain areas (Mauger et al. 2015). However, it’s not yet known how precipitation pattern changes will combine with changes […]
By Chris Schnepf Trying to understand how climate is changing, and how these changes affect the crop yields, forest growth, water from melting snowpacks, and all the other parts of our natural world, is very challenging. Increasingly, some of the primary tools for understanding these phenomena are models. One of the biggest misconceptions about models […]