USDA Northeast Climate Hub Announces New Partnership with UMaine

The USDA Northeast Climate Hub, a collaboration of United States Department of Agriculture agencies, has announced new partnerships with the University of Maine and 11 other land grant universities in the Northeast. The agreement will give the region’s farmers, foresters and land managers better access to information and tools for adapting to climate and weather variability, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. Based in Durham, New Hampshire, the Northeast Climate Hub is one of seven regional hubs nationwide formed to address increasing climate and weather-related risks to agriculture, broadly defined to include farms and forests. The partnership is focused on creating a network of information sharing designed to provide stakeholders with resources to both mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the challenges of a changing climate. The universities will be active partners in developing, implementing and evaluating materials that describe how to best cope with increasing weather variability and longer-term trajectories of change in the climate system. Ivan Fernandez, professor with the School of Forest Resources, the Climate Change Institute and the School of Food and Agriculture will serve as the University of Maine’s point of contact for the Climate Hub.  The full news release is online.