One of the speakers was Lee Frelich,  who has written extensively about climate change and strategies. The 3 strategies are resilience, resistance, or facilitation. Resilience means you put in plants that have a broad niche requirement. They can handle hot weather in freezing weather, drought and inundated soils. The list is pretty short. Many of what are called the "junkyard dog" plants are those that are resilient.

Two are Silver Maple, Acer saccharinum

http://permacultureplantdata.com/index.php?option=com_plants&vw=detail&id=93&return=1

and Box Elder, Acer negundo.

 http://permacultureplantdata.com/index.php?option=com_plants&vw=detail&id=139&return=1

 Over the next 60 years as our beautiful boreal and deciduous forests will turn into Prairie, we are going to have to replace the Sugar Maples with Black Maple from Iowa or lower latitudes.  Gary Johanson, one of the forestery experts from the University of Minnesota, stated that we should not be planting sugar maples or any of the usual maple trees sold in the nurseries. They are all going to die from stress. We have an infestation of emerald ash borer that is killing all our ash trees, but that pales to the number of Maple trees dying from climate stress. Silently they are being dehydrated and unable to make up for the high temperatures during the day with cool nights. The nighttime temperatures are rising to a point where the trees cannot evapotranspire and take up water. Over time the leaves die and with repeated seasons of drought and high temps, so will the tree.

 Climate change is now an outdated term. It is changing and not like putting on a different shirt. We have no clue where this is going, how extreme is going to be, or how our ecological systems will respond. We can only generally predict the outcomes. Our winter snows may likely transition into winter rains. Repeated freeze and thaw periods during the winter will not only ruin the roads but also damage roots and cause plants to have untimely budding.  Dewpoints will rise in the summer and cause extreme weather events. Days of heat exceeding 100°F could be followed by intense thunderstorms, only to have the precipitation dried up within days, returning to drought conditions.

One thing that was missing in all the presentations that I was looking for was Sun light.  the one speaker from big Ag  talked about having extended growing seasons. Somehow people think that warmer temperatures are going to mean we can grow crops long into the winter and earlier into the spring. No one seems to remember that we are on the 45 latitude. Although we have 15 hours of sunlight in June with 1163W/m2 of solar energy, the days get awfully short in November December and January, nearing 10 hours. But even worse the intensity of the sunlight is almost half of what it is in June. So not only are the days shorter by a third,  the intensity of the light is cut to less than half. That is not enough light to grow food and as Eliot Coleman will tell you, most of the plants go dormant.

My designer friends and I are still trying top get a hold on this new paradigm. Designing plant systems for a climate we do not know, for extremes we can only suspect, in a world that may be in chaos.