Effects of Climate Change On Animals and Vegetation

This page gives links to pages that discuss changes in the growth and behavior of plants and animals due to temperature.
Scientists expect climate change and warmer oceans to push the fish that people rely on for food and income into new territory. Predictions of where and when species will relocate, however, are based on broad expectations about how animals will move and have often not played out in nature. New research based at Princeton University shows that the trick to more precise forecasts is to follow local temperature changes.
Comparing plant communities today with a survey taken 50 years ago, a UA-led research team is providing the first on-the-ground evidence for Southwestern plants being pushed to higher elevations by an increasingly warmer and drier climate.
In a new study, Boston University researchers and collaborators have found that butterflies show signs of being affected by climate change in a way similar to plants and bees, but not birds, in the Northeast United States. The researchers focused on Massachusetts butterfly flight periods, comparing current flight periods with patterns going back more than 100 years using museum collections and the records of dedicated citizen scientists. Their findings indicate that butterflies are flying earlier in warmer years.
Using the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern United States are flowering as much as a month earlier in response to a warming climate.
Much biological research on climate change focuses on the impacts of warming and changes in precipitation over wide areas. Researchers are now increasingly recognizing that at the local scale they must understand the effects of climate change through the intertwined patterns of soils, vegetation, and water flowpaths -- not forgetting the uses humans have made of the landscape.
Some high mountain meadows in the Pacific Northwest are declining rapidly due to climate change, a study suggests, as reduced snowpacks, longer growing seasons and other factors allow trees to invade these unique ecosystems that once were carpeted with grasses, shrubs and wildflowers.
Malaria has been found in birds in parts of Alaska, and global climate change will drive it even farther north, according to a new study published September 19 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Coral reefs face severe challenges even if global warming is restricted to the 2 degrees Celsius commonly perceived as safe for many natural and human-made systems. Warmer sea surface temperatures are likely to trigger more frequent and more intense mass coral bleaching events. Only under a scenario with strong action on mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions and the assumption that corals can adapt at extremely rapid rates, could two thirds of them be safe, shows a study now published in Nature Climate Change. Otherwise all coral reefs are expected to be subject to severe degradation.
Scientists have detected signs that the planet's tropics may have expanded much farther north in the past 3 decades than climate models had predicted for the next century. If the findings are confirmed and the trend continues, it could place major strains on subtropical ecosystems, hasten the spread of tropical diseases, and generally make life less pleasant for populations living with the zones of change.
Earth’s tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows.
A huge “migration” of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are projected to decline or die out in regions where they have been present for centuries, while others move in and replace them.
Over the last century, the temperature has risen by more than one degree. The cooling trend over several thousand years is broken, and this has triggered changes in flora, fauna, and landscapes. In important respects, the present state is similar to what occurred directly after the latest ice age.
Many wild plant species thought to be "stable" in the face of climate change are actually responding to global warming, say researchers at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Their findings, in a study titled, "Divergent responses to spring and winter warming drive community level flowering trends," are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that butterfly species which already tend to emerge later in the year or fly higher in the mountains have evolved to deal with a shorter window of opportunity to reproduce, and as a result may fare worse in a warming climate, compared to those that emerge over a longer time period.
The lily, a plant that grows best on subalpine slopes, is fast becoming a hothouse flower. In Earth's warming temperatures, its first blooms appear some 17 days earlier than they did in the 1970s, scientists David Inouye and Amy McKinney of the University of Maryland and colleagues have found.
Scientists from Finland and Oxford University investigated an area of 100,000 km2, known as the northwestern Eurasian tundra, stretching from western Siberia to Finland. Surveys of the vegetation, using data from satellite imaging, fieldwork, and expert observations from indigenous reindeer herders, showed that in 8-15% of the area willow (Salix) and alder (Alnus) plants have grown into trees over 2 metres in height in the last 30-40 years.
The study, which is the first of its kind in the world, highlights that plant species are already responding to changes in climate. The results are published online July 4 in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Bauman and colleagues found that the decline in milk production due to climate change will vary across the U.S., since there are significant differences in humidity and how much the temperature swings between night and day across the country. For instance, the humidity and hot nights make the Southeast the most unfriendly place in the country for dairy cows.
The findings by University College Dublin scientists published in the journal Biology Letters suggest that rising soil temperatures due to climate change may be extending the geographical habitat range of the earthworm Prosellodrilus amplisetosus.
However, the mechanisms explaining species-specific responses to changes in temperature and water availability are most likely much more complex, according to researchers at Texas Tech University and the United States Geological Survey. After reexamining an upslope vegetation shift reported in a high-profile 2008 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pair refuted the findings that plants are moving upslope in California because of climate warming by studying one particular desert shrub.
Results from a decades-long research project show that mountain rodents called marmots are growing larger, healthier and more plentiful in response to climate change.
Climate change is causing a late wake-up call from hibernation for a species of Rocky Mountain ground squirrel and the effect is deadly.
Subtropical and warm-climate species such as the giant swallowtail and zabulon skipper -- many of which were rare or absent in Massachusetts as recently as the late 1980s -- show the sharpest increases. At the same time, more than three-quarters of northerly species (species with a range centered north of Boston) are now declining in Massachusetts, many of them rapidly. Most impacted are the species that overwinter as eggs or small larvae, indicating that these overwintering stages may be much more sensitive to drought or lack of snow cover.

1 comment:

  1. One thing I don't understand is why climate change is causing late-spring snow falls in Columbia....

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