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Global Warming Can Increase Crop Damage And Forest Devastation
February 13, 2008 at 8:26 PM
Environmental Health
The team, who carried out the research, was from Penn State, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Maryland, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Wesleyan University.
According to the research, more than 55 million years ago, the Earth experienced a rapid jump in global carbon dioxide levels that raised temperatures across the planet.
Now, researchers studying plants from that time have found that the rising temperatures may have boosted the foraging of insects. As modern temperatures continue to rise, the researchers believe the planet could see increasing crop damage and forest devastation.
"Our study convincingly shows that there is a link between temperature and insect feeding on leaves," said lead author Ellen Currano of Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution.
"When temperature increases, the diversity of insect feeding damage on plant species also increases," she added.
Curranos team collected the study fossils from the badlands of Wyoming, gathering more than 5,000 fossil leaves from five sites representing time zones before, during and after the roughly 100,000 year temperature spike called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
The researchers found that the PETM plants were noticeably more damaged than fossil plants before and after that period.
The PETM plants, many of which are legumes - the family that now includes beans and peas - show damage with greater frequency, greater variety and a more destructive character than plants from the surrounding geologic time periods.
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