Plants have unexpected response to climate change

Not all species flee rising temperatures. As the mercury has inched upward across western North America over the last 40 years, many plant species have moved downhill, toward—not away from—warmer climates, according to the results of a new study. The finding adds to growing evidence that temperature isn’t the only factor influencing how Earth’s life will respond to climate change.

“This is a very cool study and demonstrates what many of us have been saying—that we will get surprises,” writes Camille Parmesan, a climate change biologist at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, in an e-mail to Science. She was not involved with the study.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Plants have unexpected response to climate change

Not all species flee rising temperatures. As the mercury has inched upward across western North America over the last 40 years, many plant species have moved downhill, toward—not away from—warmer climates, according to the results of a new study. The finding adds to growing evidence that temperature isn’t the only factor influencing how Earth’s life will respond to climate change.

“This is a very cool study and demonstrates what many of us have been saying—that we will get surprises,” writes Camille Parmesan, a climate change biologist at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, in an e-mail to Science. She was not involved with the study.

more…

This study is a very good example of how unpredictable the environment is, but you can be sure that whatever action is taken on the environment, there will be a reaction to it. The reason for this is the complexity involved in environmental matters by the vast number of influencing factors involved and although we might predict the most obvious events, we are more often caught out by factors we did not even consider.

“A very cool study”
I geddit.

I quite like Camille’s surname.

> As the mercury has inched upward across western North America over the last 40 years, many plant species have moved downhill, toward—not away from—warmer climates, according to the results of a new study. The finding adds to growing evidence that temperature isn’t the only factor influencing how Earth’s life will respond to climate change.

This was also noticed in a different earlier study in the northern Alps in Europe.

In that earlier study it was found that it was rainfall not temperature that affected plant distributions. Plant species moved upslope in places where the rainfall was decreasing and downslope in places where the rainfall was increasing.