New research shows how plants that thrive in colder temperatures could help humans survive the climate change
Fresh flowers, shrubs and flowers from the spring can help us cope with the climate changes that are threatening our ability to grow food, build shelters and cope with natural disasters, new research suggests.
The study, published today in Nature, is one of the first to show how plants and animals can respond to climate change and its effects.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have studied the way plants respond to changes in temperature.
They found that plants that grew in warmer climates adapted to a warmer environment.
They found that a plant’s ability to survive changes in temperatures is a function of the plant’s tolerance to cold, said Dr David Tingley, who led the research.
This is what makes plants really unique.
They can adapt to conditions that are colder and they can withstand these cold conditions, because they have this ability to tolerate the cold temperatures.
Tingley said the findings would provide a model for future research into how climate change could impact plants.
Climate change is one factor that could make it harder for the plant world to adapt.
“I think there are a lot of different factors that might affect the way that plants adapt to the change that’s going on in the world.”
It’s really hard to know where the impact of climate change is going to be,” he said.”
We’re already seeing that in Australia, where we’re seeing this increased frequency of cold weather events, and we’re already having these impacts on our agriculture.
“Climate change could mean plant species are losing their ability to adapt, but Tingly said there was also the possibility that plant species were getting smaller or even disappearing.”
There is the possibility of species disappearing and it’s something that we’ve been thinking about,” he explained.”
In some cases we may be seeing species that are already being affected by climate change that are going to disappear.
“So there’s a potential for this type of change to occur more often in some areas of the world than others.”
The research, published in the journal Nature, involved analysing the genomes of plants in the United States.
In their research, the scientists sequenced the genomes from plants that lived in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which were grown at the US National Plant Library and housed in the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s National Plant Science Center.
The researchers looked at the plants’ genomes and found that they were able to tolerate temperatures up to 20 degrees Celsius colder than normal, which is roughly equivalent to a tropical storm.
“The plants that were growing at that time had a higher tolerance to the cold than any of the other plants in their group,” Dr Tingles said.
The scientists used this trait to study the effects of climate on plant growth.
They looked at how the plants responded to changing temperatures in different parts of the US.
“If we look at a region of the United Kingdom, that was one of our primary regions, the coldest was in central England, that’s where the majority of the plants were growing,” he noted.
“But we found that the plants that did well in this region had a much greater tolerance to temperatures in that region than any other plant group.”
In other regions, temperatures ranged from the cold of northern Mexico to the warm of northern Africa.
Thing is, they all responded to the same amount of temperature change.
“These plants grew well in a variety of different regions, they just had this trait that allowed them to cope with these extremes of temperature,” Dr Michael Lillis, a plant geneticist at the University.
“And so if they were grown in places that were colder, they were more tolerant of that cold than plants that had grown in areas where they were warmer, but they were also more tolerant to the extremes of cold and heat.”
All the plants have this trait, which allows them to adapt to climate conditions, so we know that it’s a trait that they have in common.
“The researchers found that these plants adapted to warmer temperatures by having two genes that are more tolerant than the other genes to temperatures up into the 20s.
The new research is a good example of the power of understanding genetics to improve our understanding of the human condition, Dr Tesley said.
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