Assisted Migration - the Answer to Climate Change?

Thank you to Claire Thompson, UBC BG work-study student, for writing this entry.

Scientists at the Chicago Botanic Garden are sending teams of people out across the Midwest and northern Great Plains of America to collect seeds from 1500 prairie species before 2010.

The collections are part of a project to preserve species and investigate assisted migration of plants as a response to climate change. Researchers are planning to test this idea with Pitcher's thistle, a native plant to sand dunes along several of the Great Lakes.

Assisted migration is a controversial issue among scientists, as it has risks associated with interfering with complex habitats and uncertainties surrounding climate change. Scientists at the botanic gardens in favor of assisted migration have recently finished a paper outlining a strategic framework for collecting and prioritizing seeds from species that are most likely to go extinct under climate change, and for predicting where species should be relocated.

Links:

• "A Hunt for Seeds to Save Species, Perhaps by Helping Them Move" via the New York Times
• The Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank and National Tallgrass Prairie Preparation Laboratory at Chicago Botanic Garden
• Vitt et al. 2009. Assisted migration of plants: Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes. Bio. Cons. Available online doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.08.015
• Pitcher's thistle (Cirsium pitcheri)

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 7:00 AM on November 23, 2009

Want to talk about this weblog entry? As of August 22, 2006, all new entries and most older entries are cross-posted to the UBC Botanical Garden Discussion Forums for discussion (you might need to use the search function to find the thread you are looking for).

This is an effort to reduce the amount of time spent dealing with spam (the forums are very good at stopping spam, the weblog commenting system is not so good).

Older entries already containing comments remain open for discussion.