Climate Change

Climate change and biodiversity are the global issues of our time. Our climate change research spans a breadth of issues including its effects on, adaptations of and mitigations by plants and the people who manage and depend upon them. We inform and collaborate with the scientific community, the public, conservationists, sustainable development workers and policy makers. We address climate change around the world: in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceania and in the United States including our home state of Missouri. We will not address the fundamental evidence for climate change well documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Plants are affected by climate change in many ways, and many of the solutions depend on plants. Most basically, the climate change research of the Missouri Botanical Garden monitors the effects of and details solutions for climate change.

These are the various research efforts by topic and link to projects within the Missouri Botanical Garden and amongst our collaborators:

Plant distributions and migrations

Plant distributions and migrations are greatly affected by climate change. Locally, in less than two decades, we have seen the USDA hardiness zones of Missouri (and most of the country) bumped up an entire category, meaning that we can now grow plants requiring warmer weather and can no longer grow plants requiring cooler temperatures. Changes of plant species’ distributions and their migrations with climate change are modeled at the Missouri Botanical Garden by various researchers and our collaborators (Ozarks, Midwest, Madagascar, Paramo, Himalayas, GLORIA). 

Our unparalleled plant information database, TROPICOS, is prominently used to model these effects of climate change on plant species. In the Himalayas, the Andes, and Africa, we study changes in plant communities and biodiversity with climate change as a dominant research theme at the Missouri Botanical Garden and among our collaborators. Unfortunately, among the plants most negatively affected by climate change, because of their limited distributions and inability to migrate, are threatened endemic plants (Madagascar, Himalayas, Andes); while those plants that can most easily adapt and migrate are often invasive species and weeds (Midwest, Madagascar, Himalayas). These dramatic changes in plant distributions with climate change are altering our living planet as we know it, and understanding these changes is crucial for managing our future.
Additional Climate Change Links