Climate change is endangering many native plant species. As the climate warms, many species will need to establish themselves in new places that are more hospitable than their historic ranges. But many native plants in the U.S. cannot move themselves by natural forces quickly enough to avoid climate-change driven extinction. For such plants to survive into the future, they will need human help to move into adjacent areas, a process called “managed relocation.”
Such a process has its problems. There is no guarantee that a plant will thrive in a new area. On the other hand, relocating plant species historically has often had disastrous consequences. Consider, for example, the story of kudzu in the American south.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have studied this problem in detail and reported the results in the journal Global Change Biology.
The issue is how to help plants move successfully without their causing harm in their new locations. The study found that some plant traits can lead to success and some to ecological disaster. In some cases, the same traits that help plants to establish themselves in a new location make them powerful invasive species. Traits like having a large size predispose a plant to not only establish itself but spread wildly.
The study recommends that people managing relocation need to focus on plants whose traits they have determined to be conducive to successful relocation but more unlikely to cause harm in their new environment.
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Photo, posted August 17, 2012, courtesy of Joshua Mayer via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
