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 phenology and pollination

Plant phenology and pollination are also altered by climate change.  The former Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Dr. Edgar Anderson, took weekly walks around the Garden and the Shaw Nature Reserve in the 1950s, noting when plant species were in flush, flower and fruit (called phenology). These data were recollected in the 1970-90s and now again recently. With climate change, leaf flush, flowering and fruiting are becoming earlier, while leaf fall is later. Plant pollination is also being affected by these changes linked to climate change.

Similar trends are found in other parts of the world. For example, the center of diversity of Rhododendrons is in the eastern Himalayas where species are found at different elevations and flower at different times. With climate change these spatial and temporal patterns of Rhododendrons are changing along with their pollination.
Additional Climate Change Links