Animals are not the only life forms that are migrating due to climate change. New research in the area of plant genomics is helping trees get a “leg up” to counteract global warming.
Just last month, NASA scientists predicted that North American trees like red hickory, black cherry and oak are better suited to survive in a warmer climate with less precipitation if global temperatures continue to rise at their current levels.
This means that, with an increase of about 0.4º Celsius every decade until 2040, winters will gradually become warmer and shorter with progressively less rain, while the tree growing season gets longer and drier.
This puts a strain on trees that thrive in cooler, humid habitats, such as the red maple, eastern hemlock and pine. Of course, individual trees are not able to simply migrate due altered weather patterns, making entire species of plants reliant solely on their genetic ability to adapt to a changing climate.
“It’s humbling and disconcerting to see areas where conditions for growth could improve but the trees have little chance of getting there unless there is active management,” says Brendan Rogers, one of the NASA study’s lead scientists.
In order to help trees gain their feet, researchers at the University of British Columbia are championing a technique called “assisted gene flow” to match endangered species with a climate-adapted ecosystem.
Forest and Conservation Sciences Professor Sally N. Aitken is one of the lead proponents of assisted gene flow. She runs a team called AdapTree through UBC Forestry. They argue that traditional reforestation methods favouring domestic seeds, while effective in the past, are too slow to match the onset of global warming.
As a result, “tree populations adapted to specific climatic areas are becoming mismatched as climate changes,” according to their website.
The group works with trees native to the Canadian boreal forest, such as lodgepole pine and interior spruce – both vulnerable to shorter and drier winters – matching them to climate-adapted regions farther north to help spurt population growth.
Aitken hopes an understanding of the underlying genetic makeup of such species (which will soon expand to include subalpine larches and conifer), paired with climate forecasts, will inform future policy around forestry and conservation.
“Genomic methods give us answers to these questions much more quickly than traditional field experiments that take decades to complete,” Aitken says. “We are using that information to inform reforestation decisions for new climates.”
By Arman Kazemi, 21 July 2016