Study finds climate change has lengthened the blooming season of Rocky Mountain wildflowers

Climate change is responsible for extending the Rocky Mountain wildflower blooming season by 35 days, according to researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used data from 1974 to 2012, and found that the typical blooming season in the 1970s was from mid-May to September, but in 2012 lasted from April to mid-September, Tony Barboza reports for the Los Angeles Times. (University of Maryland photo by David Inouye: Rocky Mountain wildflowers)

The wildflowers growing around the laboratory, which sits at 9,500 feet above sea level, bloom immediately after the spring snow melts, and remain until the first hard frost in the fall, but climate change has altered temperatures, with snow melting earlier than usual and hard frost occurring later, Barboza writes.

Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

The study found that "earlier spring snowmelt and other climate shifts have changed the timing of blooms for more than two-thirds of 60 species of native wildflowers in mountain meadows, stands of Aspen trees and conifer forest," Barboza writes. "Researchers analyzed wildflower species throughout the season. They found that half of them flowered earlier, more than a third reached their peak blooms sooner and 30 percent flowered later into the year due to a warming climate."

Amy Iler, postdoctoral biology researcher at the University of Maryland and co-author of the study, told Barboza, “We don’t know if it’s good or bad for these plant species at this point. Climate change is reshuffling flowering plants over a short time period. So it might be changing things that were set in place by natural selection over a long time frame.” (Read more)