Many native plants in the U.S. cannot possibly move themselves fast enough to avoid climate-change driven extinction.
Many native plants in the U.S. cannot possibly move themselves fast enough to avoid climate-change driven extinction. If these native plants are going to have any chance of surviving into the future, they’ll need human help to move into adjacent areas, a process known as “managed relocation.” And yet, there’s no guarantee that a plant will thrive in a new area. Furthermore, movement of introduced plants, albeit over much larger distances, is exactly how the problem of invasive species began—think of kudzu-choked forests, wetlands taken over by purple loosestrife or fields ringed by Japanese honeysuckle. Thanks to new research from a pair of ecologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we now have a detailed sense of which plant characteristics will help ensure successful relocation while minimizing the risk that the plant causes unwanted ecological harm.
“We know that, because of climate, native species need to move,” says Thomas Nuhfer, lead author of the paper that appeared recently in Global Change Biology and a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s program in organismic and evolutionary biology. “But many of the people working to manage invasive plant species have real concerns about unwittingly contributing to the problem if we start moving native species around.”
“We’ve made the mistake of introducing invasive species so many times in the past,” says Bethany Bradley, professor of environmental conservation at UMass and the paper’s senior author, “and we don’t want to keep making that mistake. But in a changing climate, doing nothing might do even more harm.”
Read More: University of Massachusetts Amherst
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