Trees On The Move As Temperature Zones Shift 3.8 Feet A Day
quote:
... "If I'm standing in a landscape," asked Stanford ecologist a few years ago, "how far do I have to travel in order to change my temperature" — to get back to the climate that suits me? Loarie, Chris Field, and their colleagues at the gathered all the data they could from climate change studies in order to measure "temperature velocity," or, as Scott put it in a podcast at the time, "How fast is temperature change sweeping across the Earth's surface?"
In 2009, they came up with an answer, in the science journal, Nature. As a global average, they said, temperatures are changing at a rate of 0.42 kilometers or roughly, a quarter mile a year, which means that if you are standing on a patch of earth, climate zones are moving at a rate (on average) of about 3.8 feet every day.
... Kenneth Feeley, and his colleagues that trees on these mountain slopes are already in motion. Not all trees, though. Just some.
Feeley looked at changes over a 4-year period, and found that trees have been moving up to get cooler at an average rate of 8 feet a year; but some, Kolbert writes, were "practically hyperactive." Trees from the genus Schefflera, (which we know as part of the gingseng family) were "racing up the ridge at the astonishing rate of nearly a hundred feet a year." Wow!
On the lazier side, when the scientists looked at the genus Ilex (a group of trees that, in North America, include the Christmas holly), those trees weren't moving at all, essentially. They'd spent the four years, "more or less inert."
So the ecology changes, and that means organisms need to adapt or die.
There will likely be many extinctions due to climate change ...
... and many new speciations as organisms adapt.
Testable predictions based on the ecology of living organisms.
Whether it happens sufficiently fast to convince the hide-bound skeptics before we are affected is another question.
So it is possible that trees will adapt faster than humans.
Note that these are measured changes, not predictions.
Enjoy