CO2 Study Points to Possible Decline in Cattle Grazing Lands
US - When Jack Morgan started his experiment back in 1997, he didn't know what he would find. Now, 10 years later, he says the results have surprised him.
3 September 2007
1 minute read
| CO2 study points to possible decline in cattle grazing lands. |
Morgan is a USDA plant physiologist. A decade ago, he was charged with finding out how climate change could affect grazing lands.
Specifically, he set out to determine how rangeland vegetation would respond to an increase in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
So, he set up tanks on patches of rangeland northeast of Fort Collins. Morgan then pumped twice the normal level of carbon dioxide into the tanks.
"We sort of looked at a scenario a hundred years out from now," Morgan said.
Now that the experiment is over and Morgan has had quite a bit of time to look over the data, he's expressing a great deal of interest in a shrub called Fringed Sage.
Source: 9NEWS.com
