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Kellogg Biological Station

Lau's lab studying potential effects of climate change on plants

Algae aren’t alone in heading northward as the planet gets hotter; all kinds of creatures are on the move. The pika’s retreat up the mountains of the American West has been covered in the news because it’s cute and furry. But even though they lack big eyes and endearing mannerisms, plants, too, are threatened by climate change.

“In some cases we think it could even cause extinctions,” said Jennifer Lau, an assistant professor of plant biology at KBS. “But there’s really not a whole lot of good demographic data showing those effects.”

To fill that gap, she and colleagues are studying how Arabidopsis lyrata, a small member of the mustard family and a close relative of what Lau calls “the lab rat of plants,” responds to warming temperatures. Their goal is “to get an idea of how these environmental changes like global warming impact plant populations immediately,” she said, “but then also whether there might be effects over longer time scales, because they might be evolving in response to these novel conditions.”

Plastic trays full of Arabidopsis specimens cover a row of tables in a greenhouse at KBS. Lau and others gathered seeds from all over the plant’s range, and are performing controlled matings to produce seeds for future experiments. The researchers will then plant those seeds out into a field warming experiment. To mimic predicted future temperatures due to global warming, they have suspended small heaters above the soil to increase temperature by 2 or 3 ºC.

Comparing how well the plants do in warmed plots versus control plots will help them understand whether populations in different regions are adapted to local temperatures, and whether some will be more susceptible than others to climate change.