Question: What plant is most effected by global warming, and how is it effected??

John Paterson answered on 21 Jun 2019: last edited 21 Jun 2019 10:40 am

Two of the most researched ways that plants are being affected by climate change is what time of year they grow at and what habitat range they occupy (the area they can live in). I can’t think of a specific plant that is most affected, but there are two general kinds of plants that are most affected. These are ones that need very specific places to live and are well-adapted to them and ones that either grow early in the year or live in places where the weather changes a lot with the seasons.

An example of plants that are very specific are ones that live in the rainforest. A lot of animals and plants that live in rainforests are very highly specialised because there are so many other plants and animals that live there, so they all have to find a very specific way to live alongside all the others. Rainforests actually have a very stable climate -they are hot and wet most of the time, most of the year. So once you start to change that climate, which is what climate change does, it really changes the lives of the plants that are highly adapted to their very specific habitat. Some plants respond to this by moving. The plants themselves can’t move, but when they send out seeds and start to make new plants, those plants grow in new areas. This way they can keep up with climates that suit them. Some plants can’t move that fast though, for example ones that don’t produce many seeds, and they are in the process of becoming extinct because they can’t adapt to the changing climate. So these plants that are very specialised need to either change where they live or they will go extinct.

An example of plants that live in places where the weather changes a lot with seasons would be ones that live near the Arctic. A lot of plants in these places can’t grow at all during the winter because the weather is so cold but they have to be ready to grow as soon as spring comes and the sun comes out so they can make use of the short summer in the Arctic. This means they respond very quickly to changes in temperature, so when climate change warms the temperature, these plants respond to it by growing very quickly. Lots of research has been done to show that plants in the Arctic are growing up to 2 months earlier in the year than they used to because they are responding to the warmer weather brought about by climate change. So plants which live in places with seasonal weather are changing the time of year they grow at.