Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Article examines how climate change may affect which species are considered locally appropriate
April 21, 2016
The confusing debates over “how local is a local native plant?” and even “what is a native plant?” have been going on for decades. Now, Yale Environment 360 (Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies) has published an intriguing article discussing how climate change may alter which plants should be managed as locally appropriate.
In recent years, as the understanding of the role of local native plant diversity in ecosystem stability and function has deepened, land managers have increasingly emphasized the use of “local native” species better to expand, restore and rehabilitate healthy plant communities and ecosystems. The 2015
National Seed Strategy offers a notable example of this approach.
As global climate change accelerates, however, local climates are also changing. Temperature and rainfall patterns that species evolved with may no longer exist in their historically “local” areas.
This may pose problems for land managers when they try to determine which species should be managed, conserved, and relied upon as “locally appropriate”. The article discusses these issues as well as historical patterns of species migration and how climate change may affect "native" plant distribution into the future.
