Plants Respond To High Temperatures By Heading North
Posted on: Thursday, 26 June 2008, 16:50 CDT
Many plants are beginning to migrate northward in an effort to survive increasing global temperatures, researchers said on Thursday.
Reporting in the journal Science, researchers studied plants along six West European mountain ranges and found that over two-thirds had climbed an average of 29 meters in altitude each decade since 1905.
"This is the first time it is shown that climate change has applied a significant effect on a large set of forest plant species," said lead author Jonathan Lenoir, a forest ecologist at AgroParisTech in France, who led the study.
"It helps us understand how ecosystems respond to temperature changes."
Overall, scientists studied 171 forest plant species along the entire elevation range from sea level to 2,600 meters between 1905 and 1985, and from 1986 to 2005.
The findings came just days after a group of U.S. researchers reported that rising temperatures and rainfall changes may lead to an upward migration by California’s native plants in search of more suitable habitats, which could eventually lead to their demise over the next 100 years.
Lenoir said his team's findings, which took into account specific elevations and locations dating back to 1905, suggest plants at high altitudes face the same or greater impacts from rising temperatures.
"Plant species move where it is optimal for them to grow," Lenoir said. "If you change these optimal conditions, species will move to recover the same conditions."
Plants move upward by dispersing their seeds into the wind, which blows them to higher elevations with cooler temperatures similar to their former habitats.
Plants at higher altitudes appear most sensitive to warmer conditions because slight temperature changes at higher altitudes have a bigger impact, Lenoir said.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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