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The Impact of Climate Change on the Flora of Thoreau's Concord
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Miller-Rushing, Abraham J. |
| Copyright Year | 2009 |
| Abstract | shifts in ecosystems all over the world, including here in the United States. Tree swallows and many other bird species are breeding earlier, forest edges are extending up the sides of mountains, and the distributions of pest insect species such as the hemlock woolly adelgid are shifting northward. Notably, most of the evidence for biological responses to climate change, including these examples, is based on studies of one or a few species. The number of examples is large, but it is difficult to know how representative they are. How is climate change affecting entire natural communities of plants and animals? Are all of the species within a community changing, or are just a few? Are most species in a location changing in the same way, or are there substantial differences among species? Are there ways to predict how species within communities might change and what the consequences of these changes will be? Despite the obvious importance of these questions, we do not really know the answers. We know many changes are happening, some of them major, but thus far our knowledge is limited to a relatively few species in a few places. To help answer the question of how plant communities are responding to climate change, we turned to one of the best-documented floras in the country— the flora of Concord, Massachusetts. The flora has been inventoried five times since 1830, a huge effort for the flora of a single town. During two of these inventories, the botanists collected observations not only of plant occurrences, but The Impact of Climate Change on the Flora of Thoreau’s Concord |
| Starting Page | 2 |
| Ending Page | 9 |
| Page Count | 8 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 66 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/2009-66-3-the-impact-of-climate-change-on-the-flora-of-thoreau-s-concord.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
