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Boulder County: Emergency warning sirens to be tested beginning April 1
Mar 26th
The audible siren tests will occur twice on each testing day, at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., on April 1, May 6, June 3,July 1 and Aug. 5.
Siren tests ensure that all systems and procedures are working properly during the season of peak flood danger. The tests also promote public awareness of the warning sirens located throughout Boulder County.
Louisville, Superior and Jamestown sirens will only participate in the first audible test of the season on April 1. After this test, residents in these communities will not hear the sirens unless there is an emergency.
Should Boulder County experience severe weather during one of the planned audible tests, the siren tests for that day may be cancelled. For updated information, visit www.BoulderOEM.com.
Residents are encouraged to review their own emergency preparedness plans and discuss what they would do in the event of a flash flood or other emergency. For more information about personal preparedness, visitwww.readycolorado.com.
About the countywide alert system
Used to alert residents to potential danger from a flood or other immediate threat, there are 25 outdoor warning sirens in place across Boulder County, including in Boulder, Erie, Jamestown, Lafayette, Louisville, Lyons, Marshall, Eldorado Springs, Superior and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
All Boulder County sirens undergo weekly tests throughout the year, using a software program that performs a “silent” test.
For more information, visit www.BoulderOEM.com.
Community Forestry Sort Yards to open in May
Mar 20th
“Spring is a great time of year to get out on your land and begin preparing your property for wildfires.”
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Forest Health Initiative is pleased to announce the Community Forestry Sort Yard operating schedule for 2013. Two sort yard locations are open each summer to provide residents a free of charge location to dispose of logs and slash cut from their land.
The sort yards do not accept yard clippings, raked up pine needles, root balls, construction materials, dirt, furniture, household trash or wood with metal in it. Sort yard staff will refuse loads that contain unacceptable items.
Allenspark/Meeker Park Sort Yard
- Spring hours: Fridays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 24th thru June 15th
- Summer/Fall hours: Tuesday thru Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. July 30th thru Oct. 19th
Nederland Area Sort Yard
- Spring hours: Tuesday thru Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 1st thru July 6th (closed July 4th)
- Summer/Fall hours: Fridays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 20th thru Oct. 12th (these dates are tentative)
The Community Forestry Sort Yards may have additional closures during the open season due to weather, staff training or other administrative requirements. To check the operational status of a sort yard please call 303-678-6368.
Boulder County encourages all of its residents to be good stewards of their backyard forest and to implement effective wildfire mitigation on their land.
“The spring is a great time of year to get out on your land and begin preparing your property for wildfires,” said Ryan Ludlow outreach forester with the county’s Land Use Department. “Simple actions like picking up downed branches, raking away all pine needles within 5 feet of your structures, cutting tall dead grass and moving leftover winter firewood piles off of porches and placing them at least 30 feet away from the home can really help improve the chances of your home surviving the next wildfire.”
If you want to learn more about how to implement effective wildfire mitigation on your land join us at the Nederland Community Center on May 11 for a half day workshop focused on “Firewise Landscaping.” Learn how to transform your home’s perimeter into an area that you can not only use, but also looks good and helps protect your home from wildfire.
For more information about the sort yard program or how to implement proactive wildfire mitigation on your land, contact Ryan Ludlow, Boulder County Forest Health Initiative’s outreach forester, at 720-564-2641 orrludlow@bouldercounty.org.
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CU study: Southwest regional warming likely cause of pinyon pine cone decline
Feb 12th
Creeping climate change in the Southwest appears to be having a negative effect on pinyon pine reproduction, a finding with implications for wildlife species sharing the same woodland ecosystems, says a University of Colorado Boulder-led study.
The new study showed that pinyon pine seed cone production declined by an average of about 40 percent at nine study sites in New Mexico and northwestern Oklahoma over the past four decades, said CU-Boulder doctoral student Miranda Redmond, who led the study. The biggest declines in pinyon pine seed cone reproduction were at the higher elevation research sites experiencing more dramatic warming relative to lower elevations, said Redmond of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department.
“We are finding significant declines in pinyon pine cone production at many of our study sites,” said Redmond. “The biggest declines in cone production we measured were in areas with greater increases in temperatures over the past several decades during the March to October growing season.”
The cones in which the pinyon seeds are produced are initiated two years prior to seed maturity, and research suggests the environmental stimulus for cone initiation is unseasonably low temperatures during the late summer, said Redmond. Between 1969 and 2009, unseasonably low temperatures in late summer decreased in the study areas, likely inhibiting cone initiation and development.
The study is one of the first to examine the impact of climate change on tree species like pinyon pines that, instead of reproducing annually, shed vast quantities of cones every few years during synchronous, episodic occurrences known as “masting” events. Redmond said such masting in the pinyon pine appears to occur every three to seven years, resulting in massive “bumper crops” of cones covering the ground.
In the new Ecosphere study, the researchers compared two 10-year sequences of time. In addition to showing that total pinyon pine cone production during the 2003-2012 decade had declined from the 1969-1978 decade in the study areas, the team found the production of cones during masting events also declined during that period.
Some scientists believe masting events evolved to produce a big surplus of nut-carrying cones — far too many for wildlife species to consume in a season — making it more likely the nuts eventually will sprout into pinyon pine seedlings, she said. Others have suggested masting events occur during favorable climate conditions and/or to increase pollination efficiency. “Right now we really don’t know what drives them,” Redmond said.
“Across a range of forested ecosystems we are observing widespread mortality events due to stressors such as changing climate, drought, insects and fire,” said CU’s Barger. “This study provides evidence that increasing air temperatures may be influencing the ability of a common and iconic western U.S. tree, pinyon pine, to reproduce. We would predict that declines in pinyon pine cone production may impact the long-term viability of these tree populations.”
Wildlife biologists say pinyon-juniper woodlands are popular with scores of bird and mammal species ranging from black-chinned hummingbirds to black bears. A 2007 study by researchers at the University of Northern Arizona estimated that 150 Clark’s Nutcrackers cached roughly 5 million pinyon pine nuts in a single season, benefiting not only the birds themselves but also the pines whose nuts were distributed more widely for possible germination.
For the new study, Redmond revisited nine pinyon pine study sites scattered throughout New Mexico and Oklahoma that had been studied previously in 1978 by Forcella. Both Forcella and Redmond were able to document pinyon pine masting years by counting small, concave blemishes known as “abscission scars” on individual tree branches that appeared after the cones have been dropped, she said.
Since each year in the life of a pinyon pine tree is marked by a “whorl” — a single circle of branches extending around a tree trunk — the researchers were able to bracket pinyon pine reproductive activity in the nine study areas for the 1969-1978 decade and 2003-2012 decade, which were then compared.
Pinyon pines take three growing seasons, or about 26 months, to produce mature cones from the time of cone initiation. Low elevation conifers including pinyon pines grow in water-limited environments and have been shown to have higher cone output during cool and/or wet summers, said Redmond. In addition to the climate-warming trend under way in the Southwest, the 2002-03 drought caused significant mortality in pinyon pine forests, Redmond said.
“Miranda’s ideas and accompanying results will be of value to ecologists and land managers in the deserts of the Southwest and beyond,” said Forcella, now a research agronomist in the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. “The work is evidence that the University of Colorado continues to cultivate a cadre of high-caliber graduate students for which it rightfully can take tremendous pride.”
Pinyon nuts, the Southwest’s only commercial source of edible pine seeds today, were dietary staples of indigenous Americans going back millennia.
For more information on CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department visit http://ebio.colorado.edu.
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