Posts tagged host
County to host meeting about ag. flood damage 10/31
Oct 30th
Flood recovery informational meeting for farmers, ranchers and land owners Oct. 31
Boulder County, Colo. – Colorado State University Extension is hosting an informational meeting for farmers, ranchers, and landowners affected by the flood. A wide variety of information regarding technical assistance available for recovery will be presented, as well as how to apply for financial assistance. The meeting will be useful for landowners and agricultural producers with flood related damage to infrastructure and businesses and with crop losses.
What: Northern Colorado Flood Recovery Assistance Meeting
When: Oct. 31, from 1 – 4:30 p.m.
Where: McKee building at The Ranch, (Crossroads & I-25) in Loveland
Details: The event is free and open to the public; no pre-registration is required
Boulder County experienced great impacts due to extensive flooding not just in the mountain areas, but certainly in plains as well. Farmers, ranchers and landowners have a long road ahead to recover from these environmental changes, and having the support and knowledge of experts will benefit the community as a whole.
This meeting will feature presentations from agencies and experts ready to help, including:
· USDA/Natural Resources Conservation Service
· USDA/Farm Service Agency
· Colorado State University Extension
· Colorado Farm Bureau
· Rocky Mountain Farmers Union
· Local Food Shift Group
· Living GREEN Foundation
· Colorado Department of Agriculture
· Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment
· Representatives from the offices of Colorado’s congressional delegation
For more information contact Adrian Card, CSU Extension of Boulder County, at 303-678-6383 or Adrian.Card@colostate.edu.
Boulder OSMPs to host open house on open space recovery progress
Oct 16th
The meeting will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Millennium Harvest House ballroom, 1345 28th St. OSMP staff will kick off the meeting with a presentation of its response to the flood, along with its efforts to open area trails, trailheads and climbing locations. OSMP staff members will be available to address specific questions after the department’s presentation.
The topics covered during the open house will include:
· Trail and trailhead repair, and trail opening progress
· Flood impacts on natural resources and agricultural programs
· Volunteer projects and accomplishments
· Plans for the weeks and months ahead
Since the flooding, OSMP staff and hundreds of volunteers have reopened 47 percent of its trail system, along with 57 percent of its trailheads. The department has also held 15 volunteer projects and has begun working with the Flatirons Climbing Council and Rocky Mountain Rescue Group to assess climbing areas – work that will help the department develop a comprehensive plan for opening more climbing areas across the system.
Individuals interested in volunteering for OSMP’s recovery projects should visit boulderfloodinfo.net and click on “Volunteer Opportunities” for information about how to help.
For the most current listing of trails that OSMP has opened, go to http://bit.ly/15msF85
–CITY–
CU study: Spruce beetle infestation in N. Colo. tied to drought
Oct 10th
The new study is important because it shows that drought is a better predictor of spruce beetle outbreaks in northern Colorado than temperature alone, said lead study author Sarah Hart, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in geography. Drought conditions appear to decrease host tree defenses against spruce beetles, which attack the inner layers of bark, feeding and breeding in the phloem, a soft inner bark tissue, which impedes tree growth and eventually kills vast swaths of forest.
Spruce beetles, like their close relatives, mountain pine beetles, are attacking large areas of coniferous forests across the West. While the mountain pine beetle outbreak in the Southern Rocky Mountains is the best known and appears to be the worst in the historical record, the lesser known spruce beetle infestation has the potential to be equally or even more devastating in Colorado, said Hart, lead author on the new study.
“It was interesting that drought was a better predictor for spruce beetle outbreaks than temperature,” said Hart of the geography department. “The study suggests that spruce beetle outbreaks occur when warm and dry conditions cause stress in the host trees.”
A paper on the subject was published online in the journal Ecology. Co-authors include CU-Boulder geography Professor Thomas Veblen; former CU-Boulder graduate student Karen Eisenhart, now at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania; and former CU-Boulder students Daniel Jarvis and Dominik Kulakowski, now at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society funded the study.
The new study also puts to rest false claims that fire suppression in the West is the trigger for spruce beetle outbreaks, said Veblen.
Spruce beetles range from Alaska to Arizona and live in forests of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir trees in Colorado. The CU-Boulder study area included sites in the White River, Routt, Arapaho, Roosevelt and Grand Mesa national forests as well as in Rocky Mountain National Park.
The CU-Boulder team assembled a long-term record of spruce beetle outbreaks from the northern Front Range to the Grand Mesa in western Colorado using a combination of historical documents and tree ring data from 1650 to 2011. Broad-scale outbreaks were charted by the team from 1843-1860, 1882-1889, 1931-1957 and 2004 to 2010.
The researchers used a variety of statistical methods to tease out causes for variations in the dataset at 18 sites in Colorado. “The extent to which we could distinguish between the warming signals and the drought signals was surprising,” said Veblen. “These are two things that easily can get mixed together in most tree ring analyses.”
There are several lines of evidence that drought is the main driver of the spruce beetle outbreak. The new study showed when northwest Colorado was in a warm, wet climate period from 1976 to 1998, for example, both spruce beetle reproduction and tree defenses like “pitching” beetles out of tree interiors with resin were likely high. But during that period of warming, outbreak was minimal.
The strongest climate correlation to spruce beetle outbreaks was above average annual values for the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, or AMO, a long-term phenomenon that changes sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. Believed to shift from cool to warm phases roughly every 60 years, positive AMO conditions are linked to warmer and drier conditions over much of North America, including the West.
Veblen said the AMO shifted from its cool to warm phase in the 1990s, meaning the climate phenomenon could be contributing to drought conditions in the West into the middle of this century. A 2006 tree-ring study involving Veblen, his former student, Thomas Kitzberger and researchers from several other institutions concluded that the warm phase of AMO also was correlated to increased wildfires in the West.
In addition to AMO, the researchers looked at two other ocean-atmosphere oscillations — the El Nino Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — as well as past temperatures, precipitation and aridity to better understand the spruce beetle outbreaks. The team found that another effective predictor of drought conditions was summer “vapor pressure deficit,” a measurement of atmospheric dryness, said Veblen.
In the new study, the researchers were particularly interested in “radial growth” rates of tree rings from sub-canopy trees of various species in the study areas that thrived following outbreaks. One hallmark of spruce beetle outbreaks is that slow radial growth rates in such areas are followed by extremely rapid radial growth rates, an indication smaller trees flourish in the absence of the larger spruce trees because of decreased competition for water and increased opportunities for photosynthesis, said Hart.
The area of high-elevation forests affected by spruce beetles is growing in the West, Hart said. “In 2012, U.S. Forest Service surveys indicated that more area was under attack by spruce beetles than mountain pine beetles in the Southern Rocky Mountains, which includes southern Wyoming, Colorado and northern New Mexico,” she said. “The drought conditions that promote spruce beetle outbreak are expected to continue.”
One big concern about spruce beetle outbreaks is their effects on headwater streams that are important for water resources, said Veblen. “In the short term, trees killed by spruce beetles will lead to less water use by trees and more water discharge into streams. But in the long term, the absence of the trees killed by beetles may lead to less persistence of snow and earlier runoff.”
Veblen said it might seem counterintuitive to some that spruce-fir subalpine forests in Colorado are larger by area than lodgepole/ponderosa pine forests. “It is probably because spruce and subalpine forests are found in more remote areas not as visible to most people,” he said. “But potentially, the current spruce beetle outbreak could affect a larger area than the mountain pine beetle outbreak.”
The study had its beginnings in 1986, when Veblen and his students began compiling spruce and subalpine fir tree rings from various study sites in the Colorado mountains. Tree rings from individual trees — which carry information about weather, climate and even events like volcanic eruptions — can be matched up and read with rings from other trees, much like the pages of a book, from year to year and even from season to season.
-CU-