Stone Lab’s summer guest lecture series will kick off on Thursday, June 14. The topics: climate change and presumably trees.
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climate change
Resilient communities in a changing climate?
Aaron Wilson
, atmospheric scientist with CFAES’s OSU Extension outreach arm and Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, and Jiyoung Lee, associate professor with CFAES’s Department of Food Science and Technology and Ohio State’s College of Public Health, will be among the dozen-plus speakers at Building Resilient Communities in a Changing Climate, a daylong educational forum on May 18 on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Admission is free and open to the public, includes lunch, but you have to register by May 14.
Get details and a link to register. (Photo: iStock.)
Soil loss: Tackling the ‘quiet crisis’
At the west end of Ohio State’s Columbus campus, within eyeshot of Ohio Stadium and the Columbus city skyline, passed by thousands of commuters daily, lies a soil study site about the size of a basketball court that could help change the planet, or at least about 4 billion acres of it.
This is the ‘new normal’
CFAES climate specialist Aaron Wilson says Ohio now gets about 10 percent more rain annually than it used to, and it’s affecting farmers’ field work and the risk of nutrient runoff.
California’s A.G. Kawamura: ‘Envisioning an agricultural renaissance’
Ohio State’s Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation (inFACT) Discovery Theme sponsors a presentation by A.G. Kawamura called “Envisioning an Agricultural Renaissance” from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18, in Room AS0210, Animal Sciences Building, in Columbus. Kawamura is a third-generation farmer from Orange County, California; a former secretary of California’s Department of Food and Agriculture; and a co-chair of Solutions from the Land, a nonprofit working to organize the North American Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance. Free admission.
Soils, carbon and climate change: CFAES’s Lal speaks on national, world stages
CFAES scientist Rattan Lal (pictured) has been busy lately.
The Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science joined a Dec. 4 National Public Radio panel discussion called “The Ground Beneath Our Feet”; was quoted in a Dec. 3 New York Times opinion piece titled “Soil Power! The Dirty Way to a Green Planet”; and keynoted three recent international events related to soils, carbon and climate change.
Lal is also the director of our college’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Center. Visit the center’s website.
Also, a reindeer DOES run faster than a grandma
Check out some holiday fun with science — reindeer DO go ‘click, click, click’; a reindeer can have a red nose — along with some cold reality: “Global Warming Threatens Caribou.” Reindeer are the same species as caribou, Rangifer tarandus.
‘We may be grossly under-accounting for methane in our existing climate models’
From an Ohio State press release today: “A study of a Lake Erie wetland suggests that scientists have vastly underestimated the number of places methane-producing microbes can survive — and, as a result, today’s global climate models may be misjudging the amount of methane being released into the atmosphere.” (Photo: One of the sites used in the study, Old Woman Creek National Estuarine Research Reserve, near Huron, Ohio, by Jordan Angle, courtesy of Ohio State.)
‘Penguins are my passion’: Environmental Film Series continues Nov. 6
“The Penguin Counters,” which follows an expert team documenting Antarctic penguin populations, gets a free public screening from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 6, as part of Ohio State’s ongoing 2017 Environmental Film Series.
“Penguins are my passion,” Ron Naveen, leader of the team, says in the film’s trailer. “Penguins are indicators of ocean health, and they’re ultimately going to be the sentinels of change.”
Do you really have to do that?
Scientists with CFAES are studying ways to curb three outputs from the back end of cows: methane gas, a potent climate change gas; and phosphorus and nitrogen in manure, both of which can pollute water.
Good for both farming and the planet? Darn tootin’.