commentUSDA Resists Updating Plant Hardiness Zones to Reflect Warming Trend
The National Arbor Day Foundation’s new plant hardiness map, which reflects the average annual low temperatures across the country, is now the most current map available for estimating plant hardiness zones. Its map is based on 1987-2001 data from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had awarded a grant to the American Horticultural Society (AHS) to update the map of plant hardiness zones, reflecting the average annual low temperatures across the country, but more than three years after AHS completed the revised map, however, the USDA has yet to publish it. The AHS map is based on 16 years of data (compared to 13 years used in the previous version, published in 1990), but the USDA now claims that a 30-year interval would yield a more reliable map. The AHS map shows how warming climates have pushed the zones slightly northward, causing critics to believe that the Bush administration has refused to publish the map for political, not scientific, reasons.
Meanwhile, the National Arbor Day Foundation has published a new hardiness map, which is available online at www.arborday.org/media/zonechanges.cfm.
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