National Forum on Climate and Pests

What’s New?

Video recordings of the event are now available.

Thank you to everyone that participated in the National Forum on Climate and Pests. Our online audience was able to listen, watch, and pose questions to a group of the world’s experts as they presented and discussed the latest research on climate change and the shifting dynamics of diseases, insects, and weeds.

About the Event

The Northeastern Integrated Pest Management Center, sponsored by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and located at Cornell University, is a leading provider of science-based information on topics related to variations in climate and pest populations, distributions, effects, risks, and pressures in agriculture, forestry, and human-wildland interfaces in the United States.

We expect the National Forum on Climate and Pests to attract online participants with a global representation. A group of approximately 30 invited experts will gather and present live from the National Academies in Washington, DC.

Our goal is to bring those in the fields of climate and biological sciences together in one location to share the latest, science-based information with an online audience and also to think strategically about how to plan for the creation of more adaptable and resilient agriculture and forestry ecosystems being threatened by pests related to climate change. We will draw expertise from pest managers, regulatory agencies, policy makers, scientists and faculty, not-for-profit groups, and information multipliers including communicators and cooperative extension staff.

The forum will include two days of climate and pest research, spanning a range of topics:

  • Shifting plant hardiness zones
  • Increasing resilience of diseases, insects, and weeds
  • Adapting pest biology that could make management more difficult
  • Changing cycles
  • Growing impacts on the environment, economies, and society and culture
  • Climate models and applications
  • Extreme weather events and impacts

Invited Speakers

Sonia Altizer
University of Georgia

Matt Ayres
Dartmouth College

Priyanga Amarasekare
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA

Barbara Bentz
U.S. Forest Service

Elizabeth Blood
NSF Ecosystem Science Cluster, NSF MacroSystems Biology

Nancy Cavallaro
USDA NIFA Division of Global Climate Change

Ben Cook
NASA GISS, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

Keith Dixon
NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab, Princeton University

Jeff Dukes
Purdue University

Mike Fitzner
USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture

Steve Frank
North Carolina State University

Karen Garrett
University of Florida

Mark Gleason
Iowa State University, Midwest Weather Working Group

Jeff Hicke
University of Idaho

Scott Isard
Penn State, iPiPE project

Paul Jepson
Oregon State University

Andrew Knepp
Monsanto

Rattan Lal
Ohio State University

Carrie Lima-Brown
New York Invasive Species Research Institute

Ken Linthicum
USDA Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology

Walt Mahaffee
USDA ARS Horticultural Crops Research

Nathan Mueller
Harvard University

Melissa Osgood
Media Relations, Cornell University

Sonny Ramaswamy
USDA NIFA

Susan Solomon
MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Jim Stack
Kansas State University

Phil Wege
Syngenta UK

Chonggang Xu
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Lew Ziska
USDA ARS, Beltsville, Maryland


Agenda

Download the program agenda (PDF).



Free, live online streaming begins at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 4, 2016 and continues through October 5.


Slide show photo credits: Pest and weed photos from Bugwood.org — Common Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) by John D. Byrd, Mississippi State University; Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (Halyomorpha halys) by Gary Bernon, USDA APHIS; Potato Leafhopper (Empoasca fabae) by Steve L. Brown, University of Georgia; Pea Leafminer (Liriomyza huidobrensis) by Plant Protection Service. All other photos from Morguefile.com.