Meeting Abstract
Plants are an organism commonly used to study climate change. Because they do not have the ability of locomotion, plants are forced to adapt or perish when unfavorable conditions occur. One of the responses plants have to climate change is by adjusting their phenology, the timing of life events. These life events include bud burst, leaf out, flowering, and fruiting. During climate change, warm temperatures can occur earlier in the year, “tricking” plants to unfurl their leaves earlier. With climate change, however, comes extreme weather events. The event we are most interested in are called late spring freezes- low temperature extremes that can occur after a plant has experienced leaf out and damage its exposed leaf tissue. Because climate change affects all organisms, we also expect to see herbivores moving towards cooler habitats, to our temperate forests. We chose to study temperate forests because they occur in a region that has a lot of seasonality. Growth, leaf investment, the phenology, and herbivore defense of the plant were measured in order to investigate the question. The methodology included making biweekly observations in a common garden, measuring diameter at breast height (DBH), height, leaf area, leaf wet weight, leaf dry weight, and leaf toughness using a clinometer. We hypothesize that we will find increased growth, less leaf investment, a shift forward in phenology, and increased herbivore defense. This study is a step towards understanding how climate change will affect temperate forests and the ecosystem services they provide.
