The climate changes and plants move north as fast as animals

There are so many ways to observe the effects of climate changes. One of them is to look at how they fit plants and animals, how they change lifestyles and how they change homes to continue to survive. And they do, indeed. A study just published in Plos Climate in fact, it shows that the vegetation of some mountain ranges in North America has already begun the northward transfer, as hypothesized. But not only: plants are moving to colder environments with speeds comparable to those of animalsexplain the authors.

The question is this: the change of house of plants and animals is due to the attempt to look for an environment where they can proliferate with temperatures that are most suitable for them. And if temperatures rise due to climate change, to try to maintain your own you need to move north, looking for fresher. Not everyone can do it, write the authors – a team from Brown University – and for different reasons: not all, speaking of plants, have the same dispersion abilitymaybe they collide with fragmented habitats or, again, others cannot keep up with the speed of climate change. And, if they do, they typically do it more slowly than animals. But some can do it, and at incredibly high speeds, especially for plants.

To observe these green shifts, the authors used satellite data from observations of mountainous environments in western North America, covering a range from 1984 to 2011.

The areas affected by the observations included very different environments, the researchers point out: from the tropical ones of Mexicoto the subarctic ones of the Canadafrom coasts to deserts. The areas analysed, thanks to satellite observations Landsat-5included the mountains of Sierra Nevadaof the Western and Eastern Sierra Madre, of the Rocky Mountains he was born in Great Basin. The researchers focused on data for August, which is considered peak vegetation.

What they have observed is that the vegetation on these mountains has changed over time, with different changes in different areas and for different mountain ranges. Overall moving northwards, as expected, and with rather surprising speeds, which in some cases manage to keep pace with climate change, considered to be mainly responsible for these movements. Not in all cases, but for some mountain environments we talk about beyond 100 meters per decadeor equivalent to the speed of some mountain animal species, the authors recall.

But also the minimum speeds – 20 meters per decade – are not so negligible. New studies will be needed to understand the extent of the phenomenon, clearly identify the causes and the response of the individual species, but a clear message coming from the research is that some plants may not be able to keep up with the speed of climate change and risk disappearingconclude the authors.