Calif. Plants Put a Wrinkle In Climate Change Plans

As the globe warms up, many plants and animals are moving uphill to keep their cool. Conservationists are anticipating much more of this as they make plans to help natural systems adapt to a warming planet. But a new study in Science has found that plants in northern California are bucking this uphill trend in preference for wetter, lower areas. Usually, coping with climate change is an uphill struggle for ecosystems — literally. Plants and animals want to be in a temperature zone where they can survive best. "We see it consistently for mobile species such as insects and animals," says Solomon Dobrowski, an assistant professor of forest landscape ecology at the University of Montana. "A lot of the real foundation studies of this have come out of studies of butterflies, for example." Dobrowski expected he'd see the same trend when he looked into historical movements of plants in a vast area of northern California. He dug through a remarkable record of the region's vegetation, collected back in the 1930s thanks to a federal project started during the Great Depression. He and his colleagues from the University of Idaho and the University of California, Davis then compared that with modern vegetation surveys. "What we found was counter to our expectations," he says. "We found that in fact the preponderance of plants in our study area had actually moved downhill 80 meters, or roughly 240 feet."...more