 According to a new study, about 2,300 species or two-thirds of California's unique plants are at risk of being eradicated by the end of the century by climate change.
The researchers have found that rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will affect the plants who are unable to migrate fast enough.
"Many species may have to move to cooler areas in order to survive," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of a team of researchers said. "In some of these cases, for example when a plant grows near the top of a mountain, there's nowhere to go."
"We found the extent of climate change impact can be very broad. In two-thirds of the 5,500 plants we studied, the area where you can find them shrank by 80 percent," Hayhoe said.
David Ackerly, senior author of the report and an ecologist at UC Berkeley said California's flora face a potential "collapse...As the climate changes, many of these plants will have no place to go."
The study, published in the online journal PLoS One, is the first to analyze the effect of climate change on all of the plants unique to one of the world's most biologically diverse areas. Half of the plant species that are unique to the continental United States grow only in California.
"The climate is changing 10 times faster than it did during the last ice ages," said ecologist Scott Loarie, who conducted the study over five years with Ackerly and other collaborators. "The first thing we need to do is to reduce the pace of change."
"It is a timely analysis of the likely fate of the plants of California in the face of climate change," said Peter Raven, President of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Raven added that in South California, "lots of the populations are right on the edge...The balance could easily be tipped so we could lose many of them in a very short period of time."
The researchers noted that as California's unique species migrate, they could be separated from the creatures that pollinate them. Biologist Philip Rundel, a California plant specialist at UCLA, noted that the effects measured by the study "will surely be paralleled by what we can expect to occur with animal species. This article is a wake-up call for all Californians that global change impacts on our environment are more than just a theoretical issue." THE END. |
