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Grasslands Hold Up to Climate Change

Jessica Marshall, Discovery News

Other climate manipulation experiments have shown similar reactions. John Harte of the University of California, Berkeley, has been heating patches of meadow in the Rocky Mountains for just longer than at the British sites.

"One of the things we've found in our site is that the grasses and sedges [plants similar to grasses], which accounted for 20 percent of the cover, showed no response at all," Harte said. "So in a sense there is consistency."

In both places, grasses were resistant to change.

Now the researchers are looking at individual plants to see if they have adapted to the changing climate, even though the overall species composition hasn't changed.

"One way of viewing this paper is that we have been looking at the wrong level the whole time," Fridley said. "We've been looking at species, but maybe we should be looking at individuals. Some may not have deep roots. Some may have deeper roots. Is natural selection occurring locally? We have some evidence that that's the case."

Understanding why the sites changed or didn't is more important than how they changed, Harte explained.

"It's not so important that this changed and this didn't," he said, "but it's the mechanisms underlying the changes that are important because those can be extrapolated to other situations."

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