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 population ecology

Plant population ecology is altered significantly by climate change. Plant populations increase or decline depending on reproduction, germination, growth and death. All of these factors have been shown to vary with climate change meaning that healthy, sustainable plant populations may become threatened as their environments change or that previously threatened populations may now be tipped toward extinction.

In the Midwest, the Missouri Botanical Garden is measuring critical plant population variables for threatened species, including seed dormancy, germination and viability in current and future climates. Will these already threatened species become extinct with climate change? Snow Lotus, a valuable Tibetan medicinal plant, is threatened by both over-harvest and climate change. The Missouri Botanical Garden is studying these conditions and developing sustainable harvest and conservation strategies for these beautiful, endemic, and threatened endemics.

Additional Climate Change Links