The houseplants that show how tropical rainforests respond to climate change

Ferns are at their most diverse and abundant in the world’s tropical rainforests. This is a paradise for these plants as they can unfurl their fan-like foliage in the moist and shaded understory. How did they manage to colonize British living spaces?

If you have a potted plant of fern at your home, your choice for a household companion might have something to do the Victorians. Pteridomania (pteridoMeaning “fern in Latin”), Britain was seized by the 19th century as people tried to cultivate ferns at their homes and in special greenhouses.

Only 70 species can be found wild in the UK, but you can purchase over 500 species for your garden or house today. That’s if you fancy the challenge of growing this fussy flora at home, of course. Ferns are notoriously difficult plants to keep alive. Too much water and the plant’s roots rot. Too much water can cause the plant to start sucking up air and eventually die.

Ferns are excellent indicators of environmental conditions because of their high sensitivity to rain and temperature. For example, if your fern’s tips go brown then it probably means the air in your house is too dry.

This property makes ferns useful for scientists studying how ecosystems cope with climate change. By studying how these ancient plants have responded to environmental changes in the past, botanists hope to open a window into the future of the world’s tropical forests.

Terra ferna

Around 350 million years ago, ferns were first discovered on the planet. These plants, which don’t have seeds or flowers, reproduce by spores and are not able to produce new leaves. They helped create the first forests and were important food sources for many extinct animals, including some dinosaurs.

Researchers who study fossil plants have used ferns fossils to reconstruct past climates, and to study the effects of natural changes. the Earth’s climate system. The prediction of how climate change caused by fossil fuel burning will affect ecosystems and plants around the world is being made using ferns.

But since ferns love to grow in warm and wet places, it’s not always easy to study them. Many tropical ferns can be found growing on steep cliffs or high up in trees. It’s no surprise that fern species that evolved in the tropics may not thrive indoors. They often require extra care and attention during the dry summer months.

Honduras is located between El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. It is approximately half the size of the UK, but it is home to three times the number of plant species. More than 700 ferns. This mountainous country in central America has a tropical climate with vast forests and thick clouds.

Some Honduran fern species grow high up on mountain ledges. They are doomed to the higher temperatures and lower rainfall that climate models predict. predict for much of the world’s tropical forests. All plant species around the globe have moved up mountains. Between 30 m and 36 mIn the ten last years, only a few people have been able to escape from hotter and drier conditions.

If conditions change, ferns have three options. Either disperse to somewhere cooler and wetter, stay and try to adapt to the changing conditions (possible if the environmental changes aren’t too drastic), or go extinct. The last option is most common for house-grown, neglected ferns.

And that’s the route which many ferns growing at high altitudes in tropical forests are likely to take as well. In 2018, researchers from the UK, Honduras and the US attempted to understand the trends in plant distributions globally. Their project is part a larger effort to create the first Honduran fern flora. A flora is a book which describes the plant species found in a particular area or period.

The alarming findings of the researchers so far are concerning. They found that 32 of the 160 ferns on Honduras’ highest mountain, 2,844m high, will survive. Need to shiftAbove its maximum elevation. These species will be extinct in 25 years or less, at most, 70 years.

Wild ferns in Europe and the UK have already started to bloom Their distribution should be changedWe can expect even more drastic changes in the future due to climate change. These plants are sensitive and have already revealed a lot about the past. They now provide a warning sign about the future.