What Makes an Arctic Plant Predictable?

• Main Author: Slider, Robert
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: ScholarWorks@GVSU 2011
• Subjects: Environment; Global Change; Life Science; Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/ssd/2011/Presentations/127

Recent documentation of Climate Change's impacts on arctic ecosystems have demonstrated that the Arctic will react to warming more rapidly and dramatically than other regions. As arctic plants respond to Climate Change, shifts in their phenology, growth, and reproduction will impact several major processes. Thus, predicting arctic plant responses to warming is critical to understanding how local and global systems will respond to climate change. Previous work has shown that growth and reproductive traits of some plants can be predicted using temperature and other abiotic factors. This study investigated whether plants' morphology or other properties could explain why some species respond to these abiotic factors while others do not. Preliminary analysis suggests that soil temperature is the best predictor of the majority of growth and reproductive traits across growth forms, indicating a common response to this environmental factor despite species' morphological differences.