ATHENS, Ohio — Kim Brown doesn't have to travel far across Ohio to hold climate change in her hand. Standing along a road in Athens, she pulls at a leaf from a voracious plant that has swallowed entire forests in the south. "Kudzu is limited by the cold nighttime temperatures," said Brown, a former environmental and plant biologist at Ohio University who now works as education manager at Franklin Park Conservatory.
"Until recently, it couldn't grow in Ohio." But kudzu isn't the end of it. "There will be winners and losers in global warming," she said. Brown and Jyh-Min Chiang, her former doctoral student at OU who now teaches Earth sciences at Tunghai University in Taiwan, are among a number of researchers predicting how forests might look (and act) under different climate-change models.
Chiang looked at sections of forests in southeastern Ohio, northern Arkansas, northern Wisconsin and central Maine for his doctoral dissertation, which he hopes will be published in a research journal this year. Not only will Ohio forests change in terms of species, but rising temperatures probably would reduce their ability to lock and hold carbon.
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The Ohio atlas suggests a decline in the American beech, and the disappearance of the bigtooth aspen and sugar maple in the next 60 to 100 years. Southern oaks, hickories and pines probably would move in and replace traditional hardwoods. "There will be some change, either an increase or loss of current distribution (of trees) due to increased CO2 emissions," Peters said. "The range or scale is less certain." Brent Sohngen, a professor of environmental economics at Ohio State University, said that in 20 to 30 years, native trees could die in large numbers from the stress of higher temperatures or as invasive species weaken them to the point they can't resist bugs or disease. Within four decades, Longaberger might have to import the sugar maple it uses to make its trademark baskets. And maple-syrup producers from Ohio to New England could be out of the business.
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