Dr. Justin Whitehill Director of the Christmas Tree Genetics Program at N.C. State
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
The holidays are here. That means decking the halls and branches of a North Carolina freezer fur, North Carolina. Second in the country in Christmas tree production and chorus freezer furs grow best in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. But it's climate change impacting that and as it begins to make its way and continues to make its way across the country, how much will that impact Christmas tree production in North Carolina? Joining us now is Dr. Justin Whitehill, who's director of the Christmas tree genetics program at NC State. Dr. Whitehill, how are you? - I'm doing well, how are you doing? - Not bad, thank you for joining us here today. Has climate change already impacted Christmas tree production in North Carolina? - I like to put this in context. The conifers are really adapted to kind of cooler and wetter environment and the cascading kind of impact the climate change that we see in North Carolina are really nothing different than what we see around the world. So in North Carolina, I think we've done a pretty good job of not seeing tremendous impacts of climate change. We do sort of see some changes and maybe longitude latitude and elevation in terms of like the north to south gradient in the state where a southern part of the state is maybe having a little more challenges than the northern part, but by and large, I think that overall North Carolina has not really seen anything different than the rest of the country or anywhere else where you grow conifers. If anything, we're not seeing direct effects of climate change, we're seeing more like the indirect effects related to more increasing levels of disease and perhaps tests that put additional pressure and stress on our crop every year. And how we manage that is sort of a big focus of what we're trying to do. - And your department does try to help to manage that. And you try to protect Christmas trees by getting down to a microscopic level. How do you go about doing that? - Yeah, we do a lot of different things in our research lab. We work with some great faculty at NC State and around the university. We have some space at the Plant Sciences Building,
Transcription truncated.