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With climate change comes new realities for forests, wildlife and humans

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Because of their unique color phases, snowshoe hares are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Photo: National Park Service

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a two-part series focused on forests and climate change. The first article discussed how forests interact with carbon – primarily as sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon. This article discusses just a few of the myriad ways that forest ecosystems – trees, wildlife and the ecosystem services that forests regulate – are impacted by climate change.

Scott Mills reaches across the table and grabs a salt shaker in one hand and a pepper shaker in the other. The salt represents a snowshoe hare in its winter coat, the pepper that same hare in its summer coat. He moves the shakers around the table, a bit of drama to underscore his point.

Mills, a wildlife biology professor at the University of Montana has studied snowshoe hares and climate change for the past two decades and finds the intersection of if and how animals can adapt to our changing climate “totally fascinating.” [Read more…]

Forest management, climate change blamed as wildfires ravage southern Europe

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Wildfires threatened resort towns and islands on France’s Mediterranean coast in late July. Photo: Matt Fidler via Facebook.

Wildfires are personal. They threaten your home, your favorite campsite, maybe even your entire city.

So it’s easy not to look up during the onslaught of fire and smoke to see that you are not alone in confronting what one western Montana firefighter recently called “the beast.”

But 2017’s ferocious wildfire season is, in fact, a global phenomenon playing out from the American West to Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. [Read more…]

Study: Wildfires emit 3 times the fine particulate previously thought

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The study also showed that prescribed burns produce far less smoke per unit area burned than do wildfires. Photo: USFS/Rice Ridge fire/via inciweb.com

Naturally burning timber and brush launch what is called fine particulate into the air at a rate three times as high as levels noted in emissions inventories at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study. The microscopic specks that form aerosols are a hazard to human health, particularly to the lungs and heart.

“Burning biomass produces lots of pollution. These are really bad aerosols to breathe from a health point of view,” said researcher Greg Huey from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which led the study. The research also describes other chemicals in wildfire smoke, some never before measured, and it raises the estimated annual emission of particulate matter in the western United States significantly. [Read more…]

Massive algae blooms in U.S. lakes, rivers portend changing climate

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An algae bloom in Lake St. Clair in July 2015. The lake is bordered by Detroit, Michigan to the west and Canadian farmland to the east. Photo: NASA/NOAA

It is a painful lesson of our time that the things we depend on to make our lives more comfortable can also kill us. Our addiction to fossils fuels is the obvious example, as we come to terms with the slow motion catastrophe of climate change. But we are addicted to nitrogen, too, in the fertilizers that feed us, and it now appears that the combination of climate change and nitrogen pollution is multiplying the possibilities for wrecking the world around us.

A new study in Science projects that climate change will increase the amount of nitrogen ending up in U.S. rivers and other waterways by 19 percent on average over the remainder of the century — and much more in hard-hit areas, notably the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (up 24 percent) and the Northeast (up 28 percent). That’s not counting likely increases in nitrogen inputs from more intensive agriculture, or from an increased human population.

[Read more…]

City of Astoria grows, sells carbon credits in forested watershed

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Astoria has sold more than 260,000 carbon credits. Over the 40 years of sequestration, the city can expect around $2 million in revenue. Photo: City of Astoria, Oregon, website.

The port city of Astoria, Oregon, owns an island of old-growth temperate rainforest, situated in the Bear Creek watershed and emptying into the Pacific.

From this waterway, Astoria and surrounding areas have drawn potable water since the 1880s.

So when they were faced with a need for additional revenue, city managers were reluctant to turn to intense logging, which could threaten water quality. But there was another way the forest could generate income: the production of carbon credits. [Read more…]