Carnegie Discoverers: Plant and Climate Change: Predicting the Future by Looking to the Past

Speaker: Benjamin R. Lee, PhD, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Holden Arboretum, University of Pittsburgh; Botany, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Climate change poses one of the largest existential threats to natural systems. In North American temperate forests, hotter, drier summers are expected to negatively impact plant performance directly, while changing conditions are also likely to influence species’ interactions. Research exploring the ways in which climate change will affect interactions among temperate forest species, with special emphasis on plant-plant and plant-fungal interactions, will be presented. Of importance will be how the historical plant specimens collected by global herbaria can be used to gain insight into the future of temperate forests.

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