As the University of Basel wrote in a paper on the study, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, most mountain plants stopped growing after five to seven weeks and started the aging process.
“We were surprised at how stubbornly the dominant plant species have aged and turned brown,” says Erika Hiltbrunner, head of the mountain research station (Alpfor) at Furka Pass. Because many plants stay green longer due to climate change. They sprout earlier in the spring and enjoy the warmer temperatures longer in the fall.
There are also individual mountain plant species whose internal clocks are less fixed at a certain length of the growth period and remain active longer under favorable conditions. According to the research, such species may become more common in the future and replace the species that dominate today.
But scientists estimate that these changes in species composition will take decades or longer.
Scientists from the University of Basel took blocks of pristine mountain grass for their study and placed them in hiking climate chambers at the Institute of Botany in Basel.
Here they artificially leave the grass clippings to overwinter in the cold dark and then send some of them into summer as early as February. They left a second piece in the cold dark until April, before summer opened in the hoppers for those grass clippings.
The researchers compared the growth and aging of these plants with their naturally growing neighbors at an altitude of 2,500 meters but emerging from the snow at the end of June.
(SDA)