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First-ever Report on USDA Efforts to Expand Agroforestry Practices
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Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today released the first-ever report on USDA's role advancing agroforestry. Agroforestry: USDA Reports to America details how agroforestry practices are helping farmers, ranchers and woodland owners enhance agricultural productivity, protect the environment and increase profits.
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News & Events
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Global change and the groundwater management challenge
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With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and ground- water overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh ground- water needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater man- agement modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multiagent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production
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Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies (1,2), but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries (3,4). In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries is reported not to respond to temperature (5), while poor countries respond only linearly (5,6). Resolving this conflict between micro and macro observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems (7,8) and to anticipating the global impact of climate change (9,10). Here we unify these seemingly contradictory results by accounting for non-linearity at the macro scale. We show that overall economic productivity is non- linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 6C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries. These results provide the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establish a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change (11,12), with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change. In contrast to prior estimates, expected global losses are approximately linear in global mean temperature, with median losses many times larger than leading models indicate.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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GOT TREES? Building Climate-Ready Agriculture.
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Agricultural lands are having to meet ever-increasing production and conservation targets. At the same time agriculture’s capacity to deliver these services is being challenged by shifting climate, changing markets, and evolving environmental conditions.
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News & Events
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Graves Farm Wildlife Habitat Restoration Story
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A short storymap that follows how one farm in Delaware was able to sustain active farmland and create new habitat for waterfowl like the American Black Duck and wildlife. Features interviews with farm managers and their experiences in the Working Lands for Wildlife program.
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Information Materials
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Published materials
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Greenhouse Gases in Agriculture and Forests
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Dr. Grant Domke and Dr. Charles W. Rice discuss trends in GHG emissions over time, U.S. land sector GHG emissions and removals, the GHG emission intensity of agricultural commodities, and opportunities to reduce emissions and enhance soil carbon sequestration.
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News and Webinars
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Webinars
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Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
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Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.
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Climate Science Documents
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Increasing Northern Hemisphere water deficit
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A monthly water-balance model is used with CRUTS3.1 gridded monthly precip- itation and potential evapotranspiration (PET) data to examine changes in global water deficit (PET minus actual evapotranspiration) for the Northern Hemisphere (NH) for the years 1905 through 2009. Results show that NH deficit increased dramatically near the year 2000 during both the cool (October through March) and warm (April through September) seasons. The increase in water deficit near 2000 coincides with a substantial increase in NH temperature and PET. The most pronounced increases in deficit occurred for the latitudinal band from 0 to 40°N. These results indicate that global warming has increased the water deficit in the NH and that the increase since 2000 is unprecedented for the 1905 through 2009 period. Additionally, coincident with the increase in deficit near 2000, mean NH runoff also increased due to increases in P. We explain the apparent contradiction of concurrent increases in deficit and increases in runoff.
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Climate Science Documents
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Innovative Regional Conservation Partnership Program to Bring Resources to Private Lands in Critical Conservation Areas
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U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack launched the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), a public-private partnership designed to focus conservation efforts on the most critical watersheds and landscapes.
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News & Events
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Integration and scaling of UV-B radiation effects on plants: from DNA to leaf
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A process-based model integrating the effects of UV-B radiation through epidermis, cellular DNA, and its consequences to the leaf expansion was developed from key parameters in the published literature. Enhanced UV-B radiation- induced DNA damage significantly delayed cell division, resulting in significant reductions in leaf growth and development. Ambient UV-B radiation-induced DNA damage significantly reduced the leaf growth of species with high relative epidermal absorbance at longer wavelengths and average/low pyrimidine cyclob- utane dimers (CPD) photorepair rates. Leaf expansion was highly dependent on the number of CPD present in the DNA, as a result of UV-B radiation dose, quantitative and qualitative absorptive properties of epidermal pigments, and repair mechanisms. Formation of pyrimidine-pyrimidone (6-4) photoproducts (6-4PP) has no effect on the leaf expansion. Repair mechanisms could not solely prevent the UV-B radiation interference with the cell division. Avoidance or effective shielding by increased or modified qualitative epidermal absorptance was required. Sustained increased UV-B radiation levels are more detri-mental than short, high doses of UV-B radiation. The combination of low temperature and increased UV-B radiation was more significant in the level of UV-B radiation-induced damage than UV-B radiation alone. Slow-growing leaves were more affected by increased UV-B radiation than fast-growing leaves.
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Climate Science Documents
