This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A study analyzing the effects of climate change on vascular plants in the United States finds that the fate of individual plant species tends to be a regional phenomenon. A plant species found in the Southwest U.S., for example, may be more vulnerable to climate change than the same species in the Midwest, or vice versa, the study found.
This showed that focusing on regional rather than national data yielded the most reliable results for understanding which species are most in need of conservation, and where, the researchers said. The findings are reported in the journal Ecography. The regional zones used in the study were delineated more than a decade ago by the U.S.
Geological Survey National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers, a multi-institutional project initiated by the U.S. Department of the Interior to "protect the country's natural and cultural resources from the dramatic effects of climate change." The study included seven CASC regional zones: Midwest, North Central, Northeast, Northwest, South Central, Southeast and Southwest. Each of these regions in the contiguous U.S. includes between three and 14 states and is defined by state boundaries.
"The CASC Network is an already well-established system of partnerships and management structures designed to help wildlife adapt to climate change," said Weiqing Qu, a Ph.D. student in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the new research. She and her colleagues at Illinois chose to focus on vascular plants because they are "taxonomically, functionally and genetically diverse, and very sensitive to climate change," she said. They also are well documented across the lower 48 states, making it easy to collect and analyze their abundance in different regions.
The researchers wanted to determine how to best evaluate plant vulnerability to climate change using the available data, Qu said. "All we need for this method is two data sets: plant geographic occurrence records and climate niche breadth," she said. "The underlying assumption is that if a plant occupies a broader climate niche, it may be less sensitive to climate change." For example, plants found across a wide range of elevations or latitudes may experience a broader range of climatic conditions, potentially making them less sensitive to climate change, Qu said.
In regions with diverse elevations, cooler areas may provide potential refuges for some plant species as temperatures rise. The team used these data sources to calculate the "intrinsic climate sensitivity" of each plant species analyzed. The study included 384 species found in each of the seven CASC regions and 22 species that occur in every one of the 48 states that make up the CASC regions.
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