NE CASC News

In the recently completed Northeast Climate Science Center project, "Developing Fish Trophic Interaction Indicators of Climate Change for the Great Lakes", Richard Kraus (USGS Lake Erie Biological Station) and partners addressed regional climate change effects on aquatic food webs in the Great Lakes.

NE CSC Postdoctoral Fellow, Valerie Pasquarella, shows us the extent of this last summer's gypsy moth invasion in New England using novel techniques in satellite imagery.

After a year of exceptionally high temperatures and near-record low precipitation, many of us are thinking about drought in the Northeast and Midwest.

Michael Rawlins, Affiliated Investigator with NE CSC and Manager of the Climate Systems Research Center (CSRC) at UMass, Amherst, with Raymond Bradley, NE CSC's Principal Investigator and Director of the CSRC, have released a study showing a projected decline in the number of days that drop below freezing across North America.  

A NE-CSC funded decision-support tool and interactive website, Shifts in fish habitat under climate change, visually demonstrates new data on lake temperature changes and consequential effects on walleye and largemouth bass populations in Wisconsin. 

The 2016 Great Lakes Adaptation Forum will take place October 5-7, 2016, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, co-sponsored by the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center (GLISA) and the NE CSC.

This summer, NE CSC Research Ecologist Toni Lyn Morelli and US Forest Service Research Ecologist Susannah Lerman, both UMass Adjunct Assistant Professors, worked with a a group of middle school girls for two days in an activity to band songbirds and talk about the effects of climate change on urban wildlife.

This summer, NE CSC Graduate Fellow Nigel Golden (graduate student in UMass, Amherst's Department of Environmental Conservation), participated in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Directorate Resource Assistant Fellows Program (USFWS DFP) in the Ecological Services Chicago Field Office as part of a larger tri-national effort to help develop a conservation strategy for monarch butterflies (Daneus plexippus). 

NE CSC’s Research Ecologist Toni Lyn Morelli and colleagues have a new paper describing how scientists and natural resource managers are working together to understand how safe havens from climate change might be identified and conserved to protect species and cultural traditions.  

Researchers at NE CSC looked at data on 49 bird species from the last three decades to examine the effect of climate change on population growth and occupancy. Joel Ralston, former NE CSC Fellow, NE CSC Postdoctoral Fellow, Bill DeLuca and NE CSC Affiliated Investigator, Dave King found that population growth influences the birds’ niche in response to climate change.

Michelle Staudinger, NE CSC Science Coordinator recently traveled to visit two coastal National Wildlife Refuges in New England: Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, located off of Chatham, Massachusetts, and Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is part of the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge (NWR). 

The 2nd annual Indigenous Planning Summer Institute (IPSI), hosted by the NE CSC consortium institution, College of Menominee Nation (CMN) Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), was held May 31 - June 3.