CNS Ecologists Release Dataset of Climate-smart Plants
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Native plant species cannot adapt quickly enough, nor move fast enough to keep ahead of climate change. If native plants are going to survive rising temperatures, they need human intervention—everyone from home gardeners to professional landscapers. But which flora to choose? And how to know if a plant native to Connecticut might do well in Maine?
To help solve this problem, ecologists from the College of Natural Sciences collaborated with the Northeast Regional Invasive Species and Climate Change (NE RISCC) Management Network to launch both a Climate-Smart Gardening guide and an extensive dataset of easily obtainable native plants that will thrive in the coming decades.
“We’ve been working on this for more than two years,” says Matthew Fertakos, a graduate student in organismic and evolutionary biology in the College of Natural Sciences and one of the project’s lead authors. “People are getting excited about planting native species, but climate change is changing what can grow where and what will persist into the future. Unfortunately, there’s not all that much publicly available information to help guide people when they’re trying to decide what to plant.”
To remedy that, Fertakos and his co-authors, who hail from the New York Botanical Garden, Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and New York State Parks, have assembled an enormous database of climate-smart plants. They surveyed approximately 350 nurseries, from Virginia to Maine, Ohio to Massachusetts, to see what native plants were generally available, and then relied on some of the best, most current ecological forecasting to understand what each state’s growing conditions would look like over the next 40 years. The resulting state lists have hundreds of options for home gardeners to choose from.
“When we’re thinking about climate change and the impact it is going to have on where species can grow, there’s a paradigm of move, adapt or die,” says Jenica Allen, senior research fellow at UMass Amherst and NE RISCC. “We’re trying to avoid the die, and there is good evidence that moving is the key to survival. That’s really the piece of the puzzle that this dataset is aiming to address, with home gardeners and landscape professionals as the audience.”
The UMass Amherst team, along with their NE RISCC colleagues, worked closely with on-the-ground experts and natural resource practitioners to fine-tune the plant lists for each Atlantic coast state, from Maine to Virginia, as well as states as far west as Ohio. “We had input and review from more than 100 experts,” says Fertakos, “and we made dozens of changes to our initial draft based on their feedback.”
Both the Climate Smart Gardening pamphlet and the plant database are available here.
This story was originally published by the UMass News Office.