Climate Change Destroying Walden Pond Flowers

Climate change is causing species of flowers found at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts to die off, according to Harvard biologists. Walden Pond was made famous by writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who lived on its shores for two years and wrote about it in his book Walden.

The biologists at Harvard are comparing their recent observations with data recorded by Henry David Thoreau more than a century and a half ago. Their reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that more than a quarter of Walden’s plant species have already died off and an additional 36 percent are in ‘imminent danger’.

From Wired:

“It had been thought that climate change would result in uniform shifts across plant species, but our work shows that plant species do not respond to climate change uniformly or randomly,” said co-author Charles Davis, a biologist at Harvard, in a release.

The Walden study shows that even small changes in temperature can have outsized impacts on plants that are evolutionarily adapted to fulfill ecological niches. Together with changes seen in other locations, like the unprecedented pine beetle damage in the West, the new work suggests that finely tuned biological systems are having a difficult time keeping up with the rapid pace of human-induced climate change.

The average temperature at Walden Pond has risen by more than 4 degrees over the last century due to global warming, and scientists are surprised to find that while some species of plants can’t adapt to the changes, others have fared significantly better. The scientists’ ability to measure the changes that have occurred at Walden Pond is rare because very little pre-Industrial data exists. Thanks, Thoreau.

It’s scary how fast things are happening, isn’t it? And yet, there are still so many people out there that can’t see the forest for the trees.

Link [Wired]
Photo credit: Roberta Rood

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