New grant for climate change research

The Department of Energy's National Center for Climate Change Research has awarded $160,000 to Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison and Postdoctoral Fellow Matt Fitzpatrick for a two-year study to develop models that forecast changes in the distribution and abundance of tree species in eastern North American forests under historic and future climate change. Changes in tree species distributions coincident with climatic warming during the Ice Age, as recorded in fossil pollen, and simulations of global climate during this period will be used to assess how well models developed using current tree distributions can forecast observed range shifts under historic climate change. Models will then be used to forecast potential changes in tree species distributions and abundance under climate change expected by year 2100.