#mixed forest

Over the last few decades, scientists have collected literally hundreds of millions of observations of plants around the world. Plant type, leaf size, pollinator, plant health, growth rate, longevity, all sorts of things have been measured. By taking all these measurements and putting them into a gigantic database, it becomes possible to use data processing techniques to identify changes in the measurements. Using this large and available database of plant measurements, a group of scientists from the University of Miami queried it to determine whether there was a significant change in the plant populations measured over the last 40 years. In every biome that was studied, they found that this was in fact true, over time they were seeing a greater portion of heat-tolerant plants, at the expense of plants that could tolerate cold. Forests like this one, areas that were temperate and balances, were the ones seeing the largest shifts in plant population. They noted that the process was slow – in fact, the recorded temperature shifts in many areas are large enough that the plant populations would be expected to continue changing even if humans did something right now to stop warming of the world, just so that they could catch up. The forests that were known decades ago are changing, measurably, due to human-driven warming of the planet. It’s showing up in the species present, quite clearly. While hopefully forests will never go away, they’re going to have a lot of work to do to adapt to the dramatic changes currently being forced upon them by humans, and the forests a century from now may have to look very different from the forests a century ago. -JBB Image credit: https://www.nps.gov/neri/learn/nature/mixed-mesophytic-forest.htm Original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0873-2 Database: https://bien.nceas.ucsb.edu/bien/