Question: what would an oak tree look like from 100 years from today?

Emma Markham answered on 20 Jun 2019:

That’s a great question. I don’t think trees will change a lot in the next 100 years, because trees grow really slowly. For example, an oak tree takes 20-30 years to mature enough to make acorns and produce the next generation. The slower something takes to reproduce the slower it can evolve. So bacteria evolve rapidly because they can reproduce every 30min, and so any mutations which are beneficial can quickly give that bacteria an advantage, and so its genes are passed to the next generation. This will allow the bacteria population to quickly change. Trees will change much more slowly, for example an oak, even if it immediately had a beneficial mutation in the first acorn it produced, it would still take another 20 years for the offspring to mature and pass it on.
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So what about climate change? Yes, climate change will create huge challenges for all life on earth. For plants it is even harder, because they cannot just move to a better location. So plants will need to adapt to hotter weather, less rainfall, drought, new pests, more extreme weather and warmer winters. Climate change will pressure plants to adapt, by killing off plants unable to live in this new extreme climate, this means there is a new habitat which is vacant for other plants to grow. One thing we might see would be tropical plants, like palm trees growing in the UK. The UK has already started growing vines to produce grapes and wine, which would have been impossible 50 years ago. So I don’t think the trees will change in the next 100 years, but I do think we will see new plants arriving from more tropical regions starting to grow in the UK. If the timescales are much greater, so thousands of years, then trees could be different from how they are now. I imagine they will evolve special roots to find water in times of drought, they might have waxy leaves to prevent water loss. They might have spines or bitter poison to stop animals eating the leaves, because they will be a vital source of moisture. It will be really interesting to see how trees change in the future!