Since 2014, the ten USDA Climate Hubs have been helping farmers, ranchers, forest landowners, resource managers, and rural communities plan for and manage weather- and climate-related risks and vulnerabilities. A key element of that effort has been the distribution of information resources via the Climate Hubs web portal. Our national and regional webpages are important components of our program’s outreach and communications efforts, and complement our on-the-ground work to provide practical, pragmatic, and science-based approaches to address climate change impacts on working lands.
Upon review, we quickly realized that our original web presence was insufficient to meet the diverse information needs of our constituencies across the Nation. USDA program agencies, extension professionals, producer organizations, and many others rely on the Climate Hubs for ready access to timely and authoritative information on weather extremes and climate changes, specific to their regions that can be used to ensure the resilience of production systems. To that end, Climate Hubs program staff from across the country have been working diligently behind the scenes over the past two years to create a new and more useful online presence for the program.
Today, we are very pleased to publicly launch this new web platform, which represents a collaborative effort including dozens of Climate Hubs and USDA program coordinators, scientists, technologists, and others. We’ve taken advantage of new technology to improve the look, feel, and navigation of our websites, and to make our product mobile-friendly. The layout complies with current USDA digital communications standards and enhances the ability of our stakeholders to quickly and efficiently find the information they need.
We’ve moved much of our original web-based content into our new online home, and you’ll see additional changes over time as we update existing information, add new resources, and make our content easier to find and share. Don’t worry – our original websites will remain available in an online archive, so users of our existing online resources can still easily access them. Our new web presence truly upgrades the user experience.
We invite you to tour our new web and share your feedback with us. Like all websites, ours are living information resources, and we look forward to continuing to improve these tools so they can be most useful where it matters – on the land with agricultural decision-makers.