According to the study, plants increased by 110 percent, but did not remain green over the summer.
A 42-year study of bunchgrasses in Montana’s National Bison Range by researchers at the University of Notre Dame showed that several vegetation changes occurred seasonally, suggesting that studying climate change on a large-scale, annual basis may not be enough to fully understand and document its effects.
The study, published in PLOS One, documented several types of changes over the course of each year since 1978 when Gary Belovsky, professor emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences and former Gillen Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center (UNDERC), along with Jennifer Slade Belovsky, senior research technician in the department, began conducting research in the area. The study is one of the longest single-location studies of plant dynamics in a grassland in the United States.
The common method for forecasting changes in vegetation aligned with climate change has been to evaluate the average temperature and average precipitation on an annual basis. Using this method, researchers observing an increase in temperature and decrease in precipitation would have concluded that this pattern leads to decreased plant production.
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