Touting a United Nations recommendation for combating climate change, yesterday’s front page of the Daily Herald asked, “Could planting 1 trillion trees be the answer?”
If so, we still need to figure out what trees will grow best in the suburbs. In 1990, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zone map for the United States, ranging from a frigid Zone 1 to a tropical Zone 11, put the suburbs solidly in the middle of Zone 5.
When authorities updated the map in 2012 to reflect rising temperatures, many suburbanites found themselves rezoned into the warmer Zone 6a. This year has given us record rain, heat waves, droughts and record cold. Is the USDA going to update the map again? And what’s the deal with all these extremes?
“Your first question is simple,” says Jerry Hatfield, the USDA’s laboratory director for the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, in Ames, Iowa, who says there are no plans in the works to update the plant hardiness map. As for the deal with all these extremes, “We don’t know,” Hatfield admits.
Read more here.
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