Modern Context
There is significant current interest and research focus on the phenomenon of recent anthropogenic climate changes, or global warming. Focus is on identifying the current impacts of climate change on biodiversity, and predicting these effects into the future.
Changing climatic variables relevant to the function and distribution of plants include increasing CO2 concentrations, increasing global temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and changes in the pattern of ‘extreme’ weather events such as cyclones, fires or storms.
Because individual plants and therefore species can only function physiologically, and successfully complete their life cycles under specific environmental conditions (ideally within a subset of these), changes to climate are likely to have significant impacts on plants from the level of the individual right through to the level of the ecosystem or biome.
Read more about this topic: Effect Of Climate Change On Plant Biodiversity
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