Tropical plants flowering months earlier or later because of climate crisis study

"It was previously thought that tropical regions where temperatures fluctuate less over the course of the year would not be so affected by the climate crisis in terms of the timing of flowering. This hypothesis has been proved wrong, said the lead researcher Skylar Graves from the University of Colorado Boulder, who added that nowhere on Earth is unaffected by climate change."

"The timings of flowering had shifted by an average of two days a decade, according to Graves, who spent years going through dried flower collections. The entire tropical ecosystem is likely to be negatively affected. These changes, and more in turn, fracture communities and food chains, the researchers wrote in the paper published in the journal Plos One, describing the changes as potentially causing cascading impacts across entire ecosystems."

"This is a major problem, because not only do the tropics make up a third of the globe, but they are the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, said Graves. Nearly 180 species of plants new to science are found in the tropics each year, according to the paper."

A study analyzing 8,000 tropical plants over 200 years reveals that flowering times in biodiverse tropical regions are shifting dramatically due to climate breakdown. Researchers examined museum specimens from 33 tropical species across Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, and Thailand, finding average flowering shifts of two days per decade. Examples include the Brazilian amaranth tree flowering 80 days later than in the 1950s and the Ghanaian rattlepod shrub shifting 17 days earlier. This contradicts previous assumptions that tropical regions with stable temperatures would resist climate impacts. The shifts threaten to fracture food chains and communities, creating cascading ecosystem effects across the world's most biodiverse regions.

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