At the same time that humans, as well as animals, are trying to defend themselves against the consequences of living in an increasingly hot and dry climate, plant beings they are also trying to adapt to this new situation.
An investigation published in »Global Chamge Biology», carried out by the University of Liverpool with the collaboration of the University of Syracusa (located in the United States), explains how is the adaptation of plants to climate change.
Over the last 15 years, they have studied the different responses to various possible climate scenarios that have a series of plants from a meadow located very close to the British city of Buxton, such as a very intense drought or abundant rainfall. The result was very curious, since they discovered that these changes they had altered the DNA of plants, something the experts called "evolutionary rescue."
Raj Whitlock, PhD and Professor of Ecology at the Liverpool University Institute for Integrative Biology, said that the fact that changes in climate have induced changes in the genetic diversity of plant beings in just 15 years ago make it something amazing, since usually plants take much longer to adapt to climatic changes. Thus, this could explain the resistance of the plants studied when they have been forced to grow under specific environmental conditions.
This research has been carried out at the Buxton Climate Change Impacts Laboratory (BCCIL), on a hillside where manipulated the weather experimentally since 1993 to see how the plants reacted.
While this experiment is very interesting, climate change will pose a very important challenge for most plant beings, which today are already trying to adapt to an increasingly changing climate.