A new study revealed that the diversity of the native wildflowers in California is threatened by drought.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show how climate change affects the state's grasslands. The researchers spent 15 years monitoring 80 sampling plots at McLaughlin Reserve. They observed that as the winters become warmer and drier, California wildflowers biodiversity decreases.
The researchers worried that losing the wildflowers could affect the population of other species such as insects, seed-eating rodents, birds, deer and domesticated species like cattle, which feed on the grasslands.
"Our study shows that 15 years of warmer and drier winters are creating a direct loss of native wildflowers in some of California's grasslands," Susan Harrison, study lead author and a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, said in a university news release. "Such diversity losses may foreshadow larger-scale extinctions, especially in regions that are becoming increasingly dry."
Dan Gluesenkamp, executive director of the California Native Plant Society, questioned the findings of the study. "In California, variability is the norm," he said to the Sacramento Bee. "They have 15 years of data. ... For a California grassland, that's not a lot of time."
Harrison said that she is certain of her findings, though she would be happy to be proven wrong - the study also mentioned that it might be too late to save the California wildflowers. "California's drought is expected to intensify in the coming decades, so this rescue effect may end up being too late for some species," the authors wrote.
Last year, NASA researchers estimated it will take 11 trillion gallons of water to get California out of the devastating drought conditions that have swept the state; this is 1.5 times the maximum volume in the largest U.S. reserve. While recent storms have made California a little bit wetter, it is not enough to recover the land from the multi-year drought.
