As we pause travel to help stop the spread of Covid-19, events are being rescheduled, postponed, canceled, or moved online. We're updating our Events page regularly to keep you informed.
If you're interested in hosting a virtual climate change meeting in your community, please be in touch by email.
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Climate Facts
Did you know?
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Perennial plants are particularly vulnerable to shifting seasons, especially as it relates to their chilling hour requirements, or the amount of time they need to spend with temperatures between 35°F and 50°F, which prepares them to break their winter dormancy and blossom. If you get too few chilling hours, certain varieties of apples, peaches and grapes simply won’t bud. If you accumulate the required chilling hours too early in the year, like what happened in 2012, some fruits may bud before the risk of frost damage has ended. And if you have winter and spring temperatures that fluctuate too much, that can lead to resets in chilling hours required to end dormancy, resulting in erratic blooms, yield loss and reduced fruit quality.
So here in Indiana, where we’re already sitting on the boundary of suitability for many fruit varieties, it is expected to become more difficult to produce reliable crops in the future, and farmers may need to shift the varieties being used. And with perennial crops, that’s especially challenging since it can take many years to establish a crop and you expect to produce from those plants for many years or decades.
The IN CCIA Agriculture Report's section on Specialty Crops provides chilling hour projections for Indiana by mid-century along with information about coping with these changes.
Read the IN CCIA Agriculture Report
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About Us:
Led by the Purdue Climate Change Research Center, the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (IN CCIA) is a statewide effort that brings the best available climate change research together into a series of reports designed to help Hoosiers better understand climate change-related risks so they can prepare for challenges and capitalize on opportunities.
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