What does climate change mean for The County?
“If you think back a few decades ago and feel like winters were colder, the plant hardiness zones would suggest that’s right,” said Susan Erich, an agriculture professor at the University of Maine.
Hardiness zones, calculated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture using the average lowest winter temperatures, have been moving north in recent decades. In the late update in 2006, much of central and southern Aroostook County moved from zone 3 to zone 4, based on data going back to 1976.
They’ll probably keeping moving in the coming decades, said Erich, one of several researchers at a recent conference in Presque Isle organized by the Aroostook Band of Micmacs. Read more here: