Climate change to create "plant refugees"

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Climate change may turn many of California's native plants into "plant refugees" in the next century as they seek more suitable habitats, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

They said changes in climate arising from heat-trapping greenhouse gasses would affect hundreds of native plant species including the state's famed Coast Redwoods, which are among the tallest trees on earth.

"Many species may have to move to cooler areas in order to survive," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of a team of researchers whose work appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, said in a statement.

"In some of these cases, for example when a plant grows near the top of a mountain, there's nowhere to go," Hayhoe said.

The researchers tracked 5,500 plants native to California and used computer models to predict how climate change would affect their distribution.

They concluded that a warming climate and changes in rainfall would force many plants to range north or to higher elevations or possibly become extinct in the next 100 years.

"We found the extent of climate change impact can be very broad," Hayhoe said in a telephone interview.

"In two-thirds of the 5,500 plants we studied, the area where you can find them shrank by 80 percent," Hayhoe said.