What can Henry David Thoreau tell us about how climate change is affecting local plants and animals today?

For the past 15 years, Professor Richard Primack and his team have been using Thoreau’s 1850s records and other Massachusetts data sources to document the increasingly early flowering and leafing out times of plants, variable responses of migratory birds, and changes in plant abundance caused by a warming climate. Learn about Professor Primack's research and the ways in which climate change is impacting the nonhuman beings with whom we share this region.

Richard Primack is a Professor of Biology at Boston University with a specialization in plant ecology, conservation biology, tropical rain forest ecology, and climate change biology. He is the author of two widely used conservation biology textbooks, was for nine years the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biological Conservation, and has served as the President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. His research has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Geographic, and other publications, and he is often interviewed on National Public Radio. Primack also frequently gives talks and writes for the general public on issues of climate change and ecology, most recently the popular book Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods.