Human Flower Project

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Walden Pond as Megaphone

Climate change isn’t only affecting the Amazon rainforest and polar ice cap; it’s changing Thoreau’s woods.

Students of biologist Richard Primack keep track of plants’ flowering times in Concord, Mass.

Photo: Boston University

Among flowers (and who knows how many other forms of life) flexibility may be the key to the survival.

A newly published study led by Boston University’s Richard Primack has been tracking the phenology of Plymouth, Cambridge, and Concord, Massachusetts,  a region of the U.S. with a long (for this country) and distinguished paper trail. At Walden Pond in Concord, where literary naturalist Henry David Thoreau lived from 1845-1847, there’s been an unbroken record of bird migrations and plant colonies, invaluable for scientists who hope to chart species and climate change.

That’s just what Primack and his colleagues have been doing for the past four years. Trapping warblers, dating aster blooms, counting buttercups, they have been studying how the undeniable warming in the local climate is changing life here.

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