Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Scientists at the University of Sydney have made the remarkable discovery that when climatic conditions change, plants don’t all drop dead – some “rule breaking” plants adapt and thrive in the changed conditions.
‘Rule breaking’ plants may be climate change survivors
11 February 2020
Can invasive plants teach us about climate adaptation? Plants that break some of the ‘rules’ of ecology by adapting in unconventional ways may have a higher chance of surviving climate change, according to new research.
Plants that break some ecological rules by adapting to new environments in unconventional ways could have a higher chance of surviving the impacts of climate change, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Sydney, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Queensland.
Professor Glenda Wardle, from the University of Sydney’s Desert Ecology Research Group, is one of the founding members of the international PlantPopNet team that coordinated the global collaborative research.
“The study is exciting as it is the first publication from the PlantPopNet team,” she said. “We were able to attract researchers from around the world to study in their own backyard, at a low cost. It’s a humble plant but it has the right mix of interesting biology to be a model for how plants might respond to altered environments.”
Dr Annabel Smith, from UQ’s School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, Professor Yvonne Buckley, from both UQ’s School of Biological Sciences and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and PlantPopNet studied the humble plantain (Plantago lanceolata) in an attempt to see how it became one of the world’s most successfully distributed plant species.
“We hoped to find out how plants adapt to hotter, drier or more variable climates and whether there were factors that made them more likely to adapt or go extinct,” Dr Smith said. “The plantain, a small plant native to Europe, has spread wildly across the globe – we needed to know why it’s been so incredibly successful.”
…
Read more: https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/02/11/rule-breaking-plants-may-be-climate-change-survivors.html
The Plantain isn’t the only plant which has spread. When British colonists arrived in Australia, plenty of the farm crops they brought from temperate Britain did just fine in much warmer Australia. For example, strawberries are a prized delicacy in Britain, but with a little shade and water during dry spells, they grow just as well in tropical Queensland.
Given the vast range of climatic conditions under which pretty much every staple food crop and food animal survives, suggestions that a warmer climate would be any kind of threat to agriculture or even the natural environment are absurd.
Plantago lanceolata (as an herb called “plantain”) in it’s natural habitat lives up to 5 years, whereas in Eastern Australia it lives 1 – 2 years. It’s 1st recorded mention of being in Australia was 1801.
The original post’s cited research group hopefully consulted (or included) the University NewSouthWales team of J.S.H.Wan & S.P.Bonser who (along with colleagues) have published some of their P. lanceolata findings. They have specifics about nuances that plants are revealing as they move into additional niches.
For example see free full text (2018) available on-line of: “Loss of plasticity in life-history strategy associated with secondary invasion into stressful environments in invasive narrowleaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata L.)”. The “plantain” plants’ primary (home, or center base) niche was on the outskirts of Sydney & then they looked at secondary niches of “plantain” just 50 Km away + another secondary “plantain” niche 150 Km distant.
What’s changed, Prairie grass, a drought resistant plant, grew across the US until Mr John Steele ploughed it up in the 19th century and as far as I know drought resistant plants still grow across Africa, one fifth of the world’s land mass.
During the dust bowl in the US during the 1930s Prairie grass started to make a come back. There is a message there.
I ask myself, why, the hell, here in my garden in central Germany several chillis are able to grow up to one meter and produce nice and spicy fruits.
Hey listen up students who have found plantain can adapt.
I have been studying a plant that seems to defy all climate change events, it has even been found in Antarctica, well mostly that long thin bit that has occasional freak warn moment, record tempt.
It has been found in deserts in the Himalayas and on every continent. It seems to have managed this world presence without human involvement.
It is called “Grass”
A simple thought experiment: It is the nature of the plant kingdom to never let a patch of earth anywhere lie fallow if nutrients and water are present and the temperature isnt too low. There are species everywhere that with water available will go to work on stingy nutrients locked up in solid granites, dolomite and other rocks.
Re: invasive species, if the invasive species finds itself on a patch of Australia with the nutrients it needs plus water, how does it know its in Australia?
Banana plants can survive in Parma, Italy – even through quite harsh winters; strawberries are grown in large amounts on the mountains of Indonesia and daring entrepreneurs even set up successful vineyards in Bali.
Life is stubborn and adaptable.
There is a technical problem with that Banana and Strawberry are man made they are not natural. They are artificial hybrid cross breeds from plant species which were geographically to far apart for the cross to occur naturally.
No saying the idea is wrong just the selection of those two is not a good choice.
Well, I am thinking of the examples I have seen in person.
In person, with some care during their first years, I also made two specimen of Pinus Domestica grow to a nice size north of their usual range, on the Emilian slopes of the Appennines.
How about the Stromatolite? Not exactly a plant but life none the less. That started out when the atmosphere was 30% CO2 and no Oxygen and it’s still here.
Ah yes, those stromatolites they just don’t know when to quit. We should send round a gurning Greta to admonish them for their persistence “How dare you”
Went in an old ochre mine once. Hundreds of meters in, and around each of the lights fixed to the wall every 10 meters, was a little colony of plants and moss.
Life exploits every nook and cranny, every niche environment it can. Just as with the Chernobyl fungus living of extreme levels of radiation, life evolves, constantly, to maximise its viability.
Who would have thought , weeds grow everywhere.
Just a small thought, but much of British colonial enterprise was devoted to spreading both UK species of food and ornamental plants around the globe; also shifting plants from dominion to dominion e.g. Indian fruit species, Australian trees, South African maize varieties to Kenya (to name one example) where on smallholder farms in the Rift Valley they still thrive alongside English apple, pears and plum trees, French beans, Irish potatoes and fat white European cabbages. And then there were the Victorian plant hunters whose endeavours led to the alien floral-arboreal colonisation of the parks and gardens across gentrified Europe. Come to think of it, I am a prehistorian and so I might proffer the observation that without the inordinately successful movement and adaptation of food crops and domesticated food animals out of the Middle East and across Europe from 10,000 years BCE we might not be here having this conversation. Also as Rod Evans points out, alongside and quite apart from the endless human tinkering and transporting and adapting of plant species, there is the ubiquitous grass in all its many manifestations – also an essential if unintended force for paleo-human development.
[Duplicate post deleted. Mod]
Note however that the spread of agriculture east from the core area in the Middle East stopped abruptly at the eastern edge of the Iranian highlands and paused for at least 2,000 years before penetrating the Indian peninsula. It actually reached northern China by way of Central Asia earlier.
It took that long to evolve varieties that would grow in monsoon climate with summer rain rather than mediterranean climate with winter rain.
And yes, the evolution and spread of grasses was of supreme importance, it may even have caused the change to “icehouse climates” during the latest 35 million years.
Whoever paid for this study needs jailing for misappropriation of funds.
Are plants adaptable?
Sea grass.
Related to/evolved from land grass.
How much more adaptable do plants need to be?
Well the special education folks certainly deserve credit for getting this past the reviewers. Plants obviously don’t “break ecological rules” by adapting to change. Those are the ecological rules. And changing from what is prevalent to something new is inherently “unconventional”. They might as well publish a paper stating that water is wet and wind blows. It would get them tenure in many modern universities, and in the EU they might even be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
“Plants that break some ecological rules by adapting to new environments..”
Sheesh. You have throw the ‘rules’ out entirely then. That’s the trouble with climate science they filter likely possibilities out when you have a ‘settled’ science. Don’t forget, we started out with an ecology of single celled progenitors -billions of ‘rules’ have therefore been scrapped already.
Palaeoecological studies show that plants are really very resilient to climate change (at least with respect to warmer climates).
At the end of the ice-age when climate abruptly became warmer the cold-climate plants as a matter of fact first thrived. What eliminated them was rather that warm-climate plants ultimately immigrated, since these did even better in a warm climate.
Vegetation is often very much out of equilibrium with climate. For example it was long thought that the climate in northern Europe was rather cool at the beginning of this interglacial 10,000 years ago, since this was what the composition of the flora seemed to show. However it has since become clear that the tree-line was actually much higher that today, so the climate was actually very warm, much warmer than now. But the “warm” flora hadn’t had time to immigrate yet:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324991910_Further_Details_on_Holocene_Treeline_GlacierIce_Patch_and_Climate_History_in_Swedish_Lapland
Gah,forget “Climate Change” What about those “rule breaking plants” that survive Summer and Winter?
This must be a product of “The Science” TM IPCC UN Nitwits R Us.
That’s what life has always done. Adapted. The adaptable thrived, the rigid died out. We are the children of the adaptable life forms. Only now it seems we have lost the gene for life. The climate has changed an infinite amount of times since planet Earth developed something that could be called a climate. For the first time ever, a species thinks it must break the cosmic wheel and put us under a cheese dome. Going with nature never meant denying anyone a future. It makes the future happen.
Land plants have survived 15 degree drops and rises in temperatures, what makes us think Great Barrier Reef corals can’t survive a 2 degree rise, when the same species grow at twice the rate, in 2 degree warmer Asian waters?
I have noticed that nothing grows in temperatures much below freezing. Certainly nothing we can eat. It is also noticeable that growth is abundant in hot areas as long as there is sufficient moisture.
The obvious take is that warmer is better. Even hotter.
It is well-known that fir and pine trees exhibit phenotypic plasticity in response to variations in environmental conditions. Gene expression in needle tissue via RNA transcripts demonstrate that individual plant response to temperature, soil water availability and photoperiod are large compared to provenance (genetic heritage). That is, despite the environmental conditions in which the parent trees grew, offspring adapt to differing conditions through built-in plasticity of gene expression. Individual plants can also change their needle morphology in response to changing environmental factors during their lifetimes.
Of course, conifers arose more than 300 million years ago and have adapted or evolved in response to ALL the climate changes during that time — since they are still here in abundance.
“Given the vast range of climatic conditions under which pretty much every staple food crop and food animal survives, suggestions that a warmer climate would be any kind of threat to agriculture or even the natural environment are absurd.”
Especially when most of the “warming” consists of nighttime LOW temperatures not getting quite as cold, rather than daytime highs getting hotter. “Global milding,” as it should more correctly be called, threatens NO plants (or wildlife) whatsoever.
Nonsense. Everyone knows that Nature is weak and insignificant, and Mankind is the most powerful force on Earth.
Rule breaking’ plants may be climate change survivors
11 February 2020
Can invasive plants teach us about climate adaptation? Plants that break some of the ‘rules’ of ecology by adapting in unconventional ways may have a higher chance of surviving climate change, according to new research.
Plants that break some ecological rules by adapting to new environments in unconventional ways could have a higher chance of surviving the impacts of climate change, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Sydney, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Queensland.
Professor Glenda Wardle, from the University of Sydney’s Desert Ecology Research Group, is one of the founding members of the international PlantPopNet team that coordinated the global collaborative research.
“The study is exciting as it is the first publication from the PlantPopNet team,” she said.
____________________________________
Glendas of Glendale – What does the artist mean by that: “Rule breaking’ plants, climate change survivors”
Is Glendale safe?
Glendale Is One Of The Ten Safest Cities (pop 100K-500K) In the United States. Glendale’s safety is a result of the city’s focus on education, community involvement, and superior quality of life.
For more information go to the Police Department homepage. Exceptional police responsiveness and crime protection.
https://www.google.com/search?q=glendale&oq=glendale&aqs=chrome.
padded rooms and straitjackets.