For a scientist studying climate change in the mountains, Missouri might seem an odd place to end up.
But for the Missouri Botanical Garden, a global research institution, the Himalayas are the perfect place to work. The Himalayas are one of the most botanically rich alpine areas in the world, home to hundreds of plant species that don’t exist anywhere else. And, outside of the poles, they are seeing some of the most immediate impacts of climate change in the world.
“I think it really speaks to our mission-driving global challenges, two of which are biodiversity loss and climate change,” said Robbie Hart, Director of the Garden’s William L. Brown Center for Ethnobotany.
To address these challenges in the biologically and culturally diverse Himalayas the Garden’s research there focuses on climate change’s impact on mountain plants and people. The program started in 2005 and has involved several Garden scientists and a wide range of international collaborators, including partnerships with local communities.
“It’s an essential part of the science and the conservation we do to work with local and indigenous communities. Most importantly because the most direct managers of the land will always be the local people around that land,” Hart said.
Moving up the Mountain
The Garden’s Himalayan research focuses on sites in China, Bhutan, and Nepal. Garden scientists work with teams of international collaborators that include scientists, students, and local people living in the areas being studied.
This project is important for us to understand the climate change in the alpine areas, where we have limited data. Further, the international collaboration has enhanced our capacity to conduct specific research and make decisions.
Choki Gyeltshen, who co-led research in 2022 as Deputy Chief Biodiversity Officer of the National Biodiversity Centre, Bhutan.
The teams set up sites on 33 mountain summits across the Eastern Himalayan region. For more than 15 years, they have returned to the same sites every 5 to 10 years to survey plants and monitor temperatures, recording with painstaking exactness how the alpine flora is responding to temperature changes.
It’s a short amount of time compared to the scale of climate change, but already there is evidence of lower elevation species, mostly trees and bushes, moving up the mountains. This is due to warming temperatures: trees can’t handle cold temperatures higher up the mountains where smaller alpine plants thrive. But as temperatures warm, they creep higher and higher up the mountain, shading out shorter alpine plants.
“As things warm, everything is shifted up, meaning you have a much smaller alpine zone,” Hart explained. “And eventually…there’s nowhere to go.”
Greener isn’t always better
Tree encroachment is the most obvious change, but overall greening of alpine areas seems to be a common theme as well.
“Every way we measure it as ecologist, we’re seeing more plants with warming. Even if we only look at useful plants, we’re seeing greater abundance,” Hart said.
This might seem like a positive outcome for local people: more plants mean more natural resources available, right?
Wrong. This is why scientists talk to local people. Specifically, key informants like herders and medicinal plant collectors who depend on those resources. They say they can’t find the plants they normally gather for medicine, incense, or food for livestock because the plants aren’t growing in the same place, aren’t blooming at the same time of year, or are declining in quality.
“If you don’t talk to local people, you might assume that greater abundance as measured by an ecologist would translate to greater availability of the natural resource,” Hart said. “But you need the availability of the species and the predictability to know you can rely on it for people’s needs.
Living with climate disruption
Local informants are seeing other major disruptions in their lives directly tied to climate change. Snow is melting. Rain patterns are changing. Landslides can wash roads and trails. And below glaciers, meltwater lakes form, disappear, or threaten to flood unpredictably.
Hart and his collaborators are looking at climate change on a micro level: identifying every plant species that grows on each of their 1 by 1-meter plots and comparing plant collections to those from past years ago to look for changes. So how does this help local people whose livelihood depends on finding the right plant for incense, or medical workers who depend on plants for treatment?
“It’s knowledge building that can really inform adaptation,” Hart explained. “How can we use the resilience of certain plant species to try to address the impacts of climate change?”
That can mean finding a sustainable substitute species for a threatened wild plant collected by local people for medicine and working with local doctors to ensure it has the same cultural value. Or finding a wild relative of a traditional food plant that may offer adaptive traits for study or breeding.
“In all cases, we try to work to co-developing adaptation and conservation actions with local people,” Hart said.
Keeping it local
The most recent survey trip took place last fall – data will be released later this year – and already it’s time to start on the next survey. Hart and others will again look at data from temperature monitors and survey plants at the sites but will also have a new focus: training the next generation. The group is looking for students and recent graduates to be involved in the next round of surveys.
“The idea is to keep things at a timescale that’s similar to the timescale of climate change… so we need to plan for the long term,” Hart said.
They are also working on capacity building at international herbaria, making sure these partner institutions have the equipment and training they need – including camera setups to digitize botanical specimens so the plant collections can be available for scientists around the world to easily consult.
Local people will continue to be key advisors, and part of long-term monitoring and management going forward, Hart said.
“These are people that have personally observed and experienced the effects of climate change upon the biodiversity resources they use,” he said. “They’re also people who are the most well positioned to make new observations, give context and meaning and suggestions about interpreting the things that we outside scientists see.”
Catherine Martin
Senior Public Information Officer