As the climate changes, cities scramble to find trees that will survive
grist.org
“Everybody is looking for the magic tree.”
    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 months ago

      The swarm of Bradford pear trees, wisterias, English ivies, porcelain berry, barberry, and autumn olive trees (and many others) choking my surroundings don’t give me happy feelings about this.

  • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    Typically with climate change (like ice ages, etc, not anthropogenic), plants migrate to stay in their ecological niche. With temperature/precipitation being the major factors, plants tend to migrate up in latitude and altitude as climates warm. That’s why you end up with “sky islands” where a mountain might have a species not seen for a large distance further north at lower latitudes. Anthropogenic climate is probably too fast for most trees to migrate, but I think we should do our best to source trees that are along the migration path for a given area. The author’s manzanita is actually a great example.

    • silence7@slrpnk.netOPM
      1·
      5 months ago

      It is, and it lives in a very different fire regime from what is typical of the pacific northwest. It might be attractive, and fantastically drought-tolerant…but I wouldn’t want a neighborhood planted like chaparral. That’s a plant community that burns. Fast.