Coweeta Listening Project

The Macon County Soil and Water Conservation District offers a range of programs to help local farmers and landowners. Learn more at this month's meeting of the League of Women Voters, where Doug Johnson will discuss program highlights, including the Agricultural Cost-Share Program, the Little Tennessee Stream Restoration Program, Farmland Preservation and the Voluntary Agricultural District Program. Thursday, November 14, at noon, in Tartan Hall. Feel free to bring a lunch.

Megastorm Sandy raised critical questions about whether we're prepared to protect our cities and our communities from sea level rise, climate change, and extreme weather. Check out this new episode of NOVA (featuring Coweeta LTER scientist J. Marshall Shepherd) for an important discussion of what steps we will need to take to prepare for the future.

NOVA | Megastorm Aftermath How can cities prepare for rising seas and raging storms?

ADVANCES IN CLIMATE SCIENCE
A few weeks ago, in our Franklin Press article about this year's heavy rainfall, we said it was impossible to tell whether any single extreme event was a result of climate change, though increased extremes are predicted for the future. Well, the science of extreme events is advancing. Dozens of scientists from 18 research teams recently reviewed extreme events in 2012 (droughts, floods, hurricanes, heat waves, ice melts, and more) and found "compelling evidence" that human-caused climate change had contributed to about half of these events. They also compared and refined their methodologies, which will hopefully make us better able to understand the causes -- and perhaps eventually predict or prepare for -- these types of extreme climate events. The full report is available through the American Meteorological Society.

Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Human influences are impacting some extreme events according to “Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective.”

Here's an inspiring article on Appalachia's new local food economy, complete with a local food guide and example of an all-local Appalachian meal. This article stresses the economic benefits, but it seems that localizing food could help address the social/environmental impacts of local development (the "ring of asphalt") and local climate changes that we've written about (see: http://listening.coweeta.uga.edu/articles). It's worth a read!

Mountain Grown: Appalachia's New Local Food Economy Hungry for okra, collards, and trout? In Appalachia, you can now get all your soul food cravings from local farmers.

Neat example of citizen science in action. It's way more than the annual Christmas bird count, and in some ways similar to what the LTLT has been doing at the Tessentee Bottomland Preserve with Southern Appalachian Raptor Research (SARR) and the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) station.

Crowdsourcing, for the Birds The online network eBird uses data turned in by tens of thousands of citizen scientists to create what may be the first real-time view of the world’s bird populations.

Join us at the Cowee School Celebration this Saturday (Aug 17) and share your "Stories of the Land" at our oral history booth. The festival starts at 2 pm and is gonna be full of good food, music, and fun.

South Carolina small businesses are mobilizing on climate change. Has anyone heard of similar business-based environmental projects in the Southern Apps? Do you know businesses that might be interested?

SCBARS | South Carolina Businesses Acting on Rising Seas

Photos from a seven-month series of community conversations at The Rickman Store.

A great day in the sun (mostly) with a big CLP team, including Jennifer Rice and munchkin, Jason Love, Brian Burke, graduate intern Jon Hallemeier, and undergraduate interns Ben Woodard and Mary Candler Scales.

We've had a lot of busy fun these last two weekends, with a booth at the Franklin Folk Festival and nice discussion at The Rickman Store. Check out our photo albums for more!

Check out the new video podcasts on our web site, made by local schoolteachers as part of the summer Research Experiences for Teachers program!

http://listening.coweeta.uga.edu/podcasts

Podcasts | Coweeta Listening Project The Coweeta Listening Project is collecting videos from both Coweeta scientists and members of the community and making them available as watchable Podcasts. These Podcasts are organized by contributor and topic. Each group of podcasts will be available from the links below. Video Journals from the...

Decline of the Hemlock, Part I | Coweeta Listening Project Most readers have probably noticed that hemlock trees in the southern Appalachians are losing their needles and dying due to the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). The hemlock woolly adelgid is a tiny but devastating insect that has spread throughout the area, decimating the hemlock population. These los...