This report provides national, regional, and local information to support effective decision making by U.S. agricultural producers, resource managers, and other agricultural system stakeholders. A set of 20 indicators identifies high-priority agricultural and climate data products while providing the basis for tracking climate change as it plays out across American working lands, toward devising adaptive operational responses.
NASA's Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resource (POWER) project was initiated to distribute NASA satellite-based and research data parameters customized for usage by the renewable energy and agricultural communities. The POWER Project Services Platform features numerous methods to obtain data products including a "Data Access Viewer", Web image services, and a direct access through URL commands. The web-based application currently supports Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers.
Projected changes in climate have implications for public planning, utilities, city budgets, and public health, particularly for vulnerable populations such as the young, elderly, and poor. A group of researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln banded together with the City of Lincoln, Nebraska, to help municipalities across the Midwest plan for such changes. The project is intended to help cities determine where to invest their limited dollars to match future needs of their communities.
The project website hosts municipal climate adaptation reports for:
This web application, published on Esri's Story Map platform, features three metrics that influence plant growth and survival:
This mapping tool provides data for glacial lakes in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The data includes likely suitability for fishes, land cover along the shoreline and in the lake’s watershed, and conservation recommendations to supplement existing information for each lake. The planner can be used to inform single-lake management, establish a framework for conservation strategies in each lake, identify patterns in fish habitat due to climate and land use change, and help prioritize limited resources among lakes.
Ecosystems across the nation will be increasingly affected by a changing climate. Understanding and evaluating the climate change impacts that may impact a particular region or system is an important first step in adapting to climate change. This interactive map can help users explore how climate change may affect the region and ecosystems that they work within.
Soil erosion is the movement of soil particles down and from sloping land, reducing soil productivity and degrading water quality. Soil erosion thins and can completely remove topsoil, the soil layer richest in organic matter and plant nutrient concentration. These lost nutrients must be replaced for crop production purposes, adding extra cost in addition to lost crop yield potential.
The High Plains Regional Climate Center provides access to a suite of temperature and precipitation maps across the United States. A user-friendly interface enables users to easily choose from a comprehensive range of products, timescales, and regions.
Across rural landscapes of the Northern Great Plains, evidence of the beef cattle industry is everywhere: tall grain elevators and bins that store feed products dominate many small towns, and it’s very common to see beef cattle grazing in pastures or gathering around automated feeders in animal feeding operations. Indeed, in Nebraska—long known as “the beef state”—the Nebraska Beef Council asserts that beef production is “the state’s single largest industry and the engine that powers the state’s economy.”
Fresh out of graduate school, Chris Carparelli joined AmeriCorps and put his education to work by serving the community. Though he had few financial resources at his disposal, Carparelli used his knowledge of water management and drought planning—and worked extensively with a comprehensive set of stakeholders—to develop a drought resiliency plan for the Beaverhead Watershed of Montana.