Plants, like animals and humans, seek shelter from climate change. And when they move, they take entire ecosystems with them. Researchers at the forefront of conservation are calling for a new concept to understand why and how plants move over time. The key to future biodiversity conservation may lie in understanding the past.
Jenny McGuire, an associate professor in the College of Biological and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote a special paper on biodiversity for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with colleagues from Texas, Norway, and Argentina. Given the unique nature of the past as a lens for biodiversity conservation on a changing planet, McGuire and colleagues highlight critical questions that need to be addressed for successful conservation efforts into the future. This characterization leads to conservation studies that highlight the complex and ever-changing dynamics of climate change and the changing ways people use land. These factors interact over time, causing dynamic change and demonstrating the importance of learning from the past and incorporating time perspectives into conservation strategies.
An example of such work featured in the journal is McGuire's study of plants in North America, which looks at how and why they move across geography over time, where they move and why it matters.
"Plants are changing their geographic range, and it's happening without our knowledge," McGuire said. “When seeds are dropped or transported to distant places, plant seeds can survive and develop the changes caused by climate change. Studying the unique dynamics of plants over millennia helps us understand how species can and do adapt to climate change. It teaches us how to maintain diversity.” Biology and future conservation of rapid climate change.
Climate Integrity: A New Measure for Understanding Vulnerability
The first step is to understand which plants exhibit what McGuire calls "climate integrity" and which do not. If a plant is climate tolerant, it means that it stays true to its chosen climate, often migrating from one geographic region to another over millennia to maintain a favorable habitat. Plants that do not demonstrate climate integrity are adapting to climate change. Loyalty to one's climate does not mean loyalty to a particular place.
To study tree health, McGuire and former Georgia Institute of Technology postdoctoral fellow Yue Wang (an assistant professor in the School of Ecology at Sun Yat-sen University in China) studied pollen data from a tumor paleobiology database that contains pollen data. sediment core fossils. North America. Each sediment core was taken layer by layer, resulting in a series of pollen data from different periods of history. The data also indicate the relative abundance of different plant species represented by flower types: pines and pines. oak against, for example, grass. Draw what plants were there and when they were.
McGuire and Wang studied data from 13,240 fossil pollen samples taken from 337 locations in North America. For each of the 16 major North American plant species, they divided the floral data from 18,000 years ago to the present into six separate 4,000-year periods, or "boxes." Wang used this data to determine all climate conditions containing petrified pollen for any tree species, such as oaks, for each time period. Wang then observed how the climate of each tree changed from one moment to the next. Wang did this by comparing the distribution of pollinator species between successive periods, allowing the team to determine how and why the climate of each tree species changed over time.
“This process allowed us to study the climate adaptations of these different plant species, showing that some plants maintain a very constant climate even when the climate is changing rapidly,” Wang said.
For example, their results show that when the North American glaciers retreated about 18,000 years ago, firs and alders moved north to maintain cooler temperatures in their habitat.
Importantly, McGuire and Wang found that most North American plant species have shown long-term resilience to climate change over the past 18,000 years. They found that plants that migrated far also had better weather tracking during the transition.
But some plants were better than others. For example, tiny willow seeds can fly long distances, allowing them to accurately track their preferred weather conditions. But the seeds of large ash trees, for example, can only disperse a short distance from their parent trees, making it difficult for them to keep track of the weather. Habitat disturbance by humans makes it difficult for ash trees to develop new habitats. Since there is no habitat for ash trees nearby, their young are forced to leave, which is a particular problem for ash trees, further reducing their migratory movements.
Protect the fabric of life.
On the other hand, by identifying the plants historically most sensitive to climate change, McGuire and Wang's research could help conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy prioritize areas where biodiversity is most vulnerable to climate change.
As a final step, McGuire and Wang identified "climate saturation zones," areas that have historically shown high resilience to climate change and whose plants should move quickly as the climate changes. They compared these hotspots to climate buffer zones defined by The Nature Conservancy that could provide shelter for these plants. While plants in these vulnerable regions can adapt to climate change by changing their distribution, plants can face significant challenges as the region's climate change capacity is overwhelmed by human contact and habitat change. Improving these priorities will help stakeholders identify effective strategies to help the sector thrive.
“I think understanding climate integrity is a great new idea, but it's important to move forward, especially considering how to prioritize protecting different plants from climate change,” McGuire said. "It's important to see that some plants and animals are more vulnerable to climate change, and this information could help develop better strategies to protect our planet's biodiversity."
Further information: McGuire, Jenny L. et al., The Past as a Lens for Biodiversity Conservation in a Dynamically Changing Planet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201950120. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201950120
Wang, Yu. A., Plants Maintain Climatic Integrity Under Dynamic Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201946119. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201946119
Quote: Plants seek refuge on our planet (February 6, 2023 ). Retrieved February 6, 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-02-refuge-dynamically-planet.html.
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