BEIJING,
Jan. 9 (Xinhuanet) -- Plants with short life cycles can adapt more quickly to
climate change than those that reproduce slowly, according to a new study by
researchers at the University of California, Irvine.
The findings are reported in Tuesday's issue of
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This finding suggests that quick-growing plants such
as weeds may cope better with global warming than slower-growing plants such as
Redwood trees -- a phenomenon that could lead to future changes in the Earth's
plant life.
"Some species evolve fast enough to keep up with
environmental change," said Arthur Weis, professor of ecology and evolutionary
biology. "Global warming may increase the pace of this change so that certain
species may have difficulty keeping up. Plants with longer life cycles will have
fewer generations over which to evolve."
The researchers studied field mustard, a weedy plant
found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This plant goes from seed to flower
and back to seed in one year.
In a greenhouse, they grew mustard plants at the same
time from seeds collected near the UCI campus in the spring of 1997 -- two years
before a five-year drought -- and seeds collected after the drought in the
winter of 2004.
The post-drought seeds flowered earlier than those
collected before the drought, a shift in timing that would enable them to
complete seed production before the soil dried out.
In a separate paper in the same issue, researchers
report that amphibians such as salamanders and frogs appear able to adapt
rapidly to changes in the environment.
Kim Roelants of Vrije University in Brussels,
Belgium, and colleagues report that they found no major extinctions of
amphibians in a study of the fossil record of periods when other land animals
were undergoing major extinctions.
(Agencies)
