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Some Like It Hot: Are Desert Plants Indifferent to Climate Change?

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Progress in Botany

Part of the book series: Progress in Botany ((BOTANY,volume 75))

Abstract

Deserts rank at the forefront of vulnerability to global change because their biota is expected to encounter large climatic changes while apparently existing at biological limits. We review the available evidence for climate change effects on arid lands, and specifically on vegetation because as primary producers, plants are main providers of ecosystem services. We summarize field experiments and correlative evidence from spatial and temporal climatic gradients. Surprisingly, only few climate manipulation experiments have been conducted in semideserts, none in arid regions, and almost none in cold drylands. We argue that correlative approaches do not yield the necessary knowledge to understand and thus mitigate potential changes due to their oversight of long-term evolutionary processes. Nonetheless, the limited mechanistic evidence suggests a surprisingly high resilience of desert vegetation to changes in precipitation and CO2. We suggest this resilience is due to specific adaptations that have evolved in response to stressful and highly variable climatic conditions.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to J. Metz for providing unpublished data on plant diversity along an aridity gradient in Israel. K.T. acknowledges support from the GLOWA Jordan River project, funded by the German Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF), as well as additional funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG; TI338_11-1, and TI338_12-1). R.S.-G acknowledges support from the Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Plant Ecology Group, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 3, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Katja Tielbörger

  2. Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, 18057, Rostock, Germany

    Roberto Salguero-Gómez

  3. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Goddard Building (#8), St Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Roberto Salguero-Gómez

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  1. Katja Tielbörger
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Correspondence to Katja Tielbörger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Darmstadt, Germany

    Ulrich Lüttge

  2. Universität Bielefeld FB Geobotanik, Bielefeld, Germany

    Wolfram Beyschlag

  3. MS330/Department of Biochemistry, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

    John Cushman

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Tielbörger, K., Salguero-Gómez, R. (2014). Some Like It Hot: Are Desert Plants Indifferent to Climate Change?. In: Lüttge, U., Beyschlag, W., Cushman, J. (eds) Progress in Botany. Progress in Botany, vol 75. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38797-5_12

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