The White House has selected Raleigh as one of seven regional research hubs to assist farmers in adapting their agricultural practices to a time of changing climate that has brought drought, flood and unpredictable weather.
The announcement was made earlier this month by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilisack.
The Southeastern Regional Climate Hub will contain a research library, train officials to work with rural farmers, coordinate climate research information and organize educational programs for farmers. The hub will work with farmers, ranchers and timber specialists in 11 Southeastern states and Puerto Rico.
The seven hubs have also received a significant amount of attention on the major stage when President Barack Obama touted the new hubs in his State of the Union address last month.
The announcement came only a week after the official grand opening of the Southeastern Climate Science Center, which works under the Interior Department and collaborates directly with the United States Geographical Survey.
According to Steve McNulty, director of the USDA Climate Hub and a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, the new hub will not be one that conducts original research in the traditional sense. Instead it will emphasize translating data accumulated during 20 years of climate research into tangible solutions for farmers in the Southeast.
According to McNulty, although the Federal Government has spent billions of dollars on climate change research, very little of that research funding has gone into tools that farmers can use to adapt to a changing environment.
“This hub is designed to take the existing science and translate it into land management techniques,” McNulty said. “The hub will deal primarily with the aspects of natural resource management, agriculture and grazing land, which will be working primarily with cattle in the western part of the Southeast.”
According to McNulty, specific topics that the hub will be working in the region include drift irrigation, which is a method that saves water and fertilizer by allowing water to drip slowly to the roots of plants and developing more tolerant crops via genetic engineering.
With weather conditions continuing to change significantly, McNulty said the new Hub will be instrumental for farmers hoping to learn to adapt.
For example, it will teach farmers to change harvest schedules based on climate change variability.
Although the center just had its grand opening, it has been in operation for about two years.
“Take science that’s already been done into tools and strategies, from land-use practices to tilling soil to better improvement to the use of water, genetic engineering of crops, higher tolerance,” McNulty said.
However, the USDA isn’t the only federal organization leading a climate change effort on campus.
According to Gerald McMohan, the USGS director of the Southeast Climate Science Center, this center will differ from the USDA hub in terms of its primary emphasis.
Instead of working to specifically outfit farmers and foresters with new techniques, McMohan said the SE CSC is more of a traditional research center, but emphasized that the results still have tangible implications.
“Generally what we’re doing is developing projects that will inform concrete decisions,” McMohan said. “It might be someone in the federal or state government.”
Current projects that the SE CSC is currently leading include developing new climate models to better understand ecological patterns in Southeastern United States as well as Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
McMohan said the CSC is just getting back its first sets of results now and is currently in the process undergoing scientific review.
McMohan said N.C. State researchers are currently working on the appropriateness of certain research techniques for the region.
“We have a pot of research funds, about $1 million per year, and we allocate those funds in a competitive process to USGS scientists, primarily in the Southeast, or scientists working at N.C. State,” McMohan said.
