Flipping through field notebooks…
Much research at RMBL and elsewhere has focused on the effects of climate warming on plant communities. Less studied is how these communities will recover upon termination of heating. Although society is unlikely to actually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in the coming decades, it is nevertheless of interest to understand how reversible are the ecological effects of warming. Do ecosystems undergo tipping-point-like transitions under warming that lock in change even when warming is reversed, or can we expect recovery of our altered ecosystems should society ever be able to undo the current phase of warming? If so, on what time scale? RMBL provides an opportunity to address these questions by taking advantage of the termination in 2019 of the long-term meadow-warming experiment. In that experiment, measurements revealed significant shifts in plant dominance and flowering success in heated versus control plots. This study will measure these same vegetation variables at least up to 7 years post-termination, to determine the degree to which vegetation in the former heated plots is recovering to levels observed in the former control plots.
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