In a Warming World, Wildflowers Offer a Warning
The natural world is alive with dialogue. Plants participate in conversations both above- and belowground. Their petals shout to pollinators, beckoning them with bright colors, sweet scents and food. Their roots whisper with the fungi with whom they exchange nutrients. Mycorrhizal fungi, which form symbiotic relationships with neighboring plants, draw carbon down deep into the soil while facilitating the plants’ uptake of beneficial carbohydrates and minerals.
But the form this botanical discourse takes is shifting in today’s warming world. Researchers led by John Harte, an ecologist at University of California, Berkeley, artificially warmed a subalpine meadow near Gothic, Colorado, for 29 years — one of the longest-running climate change experiments in the world.
Scientists used heat lamps to warm test plots, increasing the soil temperature by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2ºC). Under current climate models, that’s an optimistic estimate for average global temperature rise by 2100; by comparison, state models show Colorado could warm by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit.