Scientists have observed mangroves shifting up the Florida coastline The Miami Herald reported Friday.
The plants have reportedly destroyed salt marshes as a result of global climate change, but the harm may not be as bad as the situation might look.
"There are plenty of examples of climate change having a negative impact, but this is something very different," Kyle Cavanaugh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center told The Herald. "Here we have one important, highly productive coastal system - in this case, salt marshes - being replaced by another very important, highly productive coastal system - mangroves," Cavanaugh told The Herald. "The question we have to answer is what do these changes mean to Florida's ecosystem? I think we'll find that they are not cause for alarm. There are mangrove forests all over the globe that are pushing up on the limits of salt marshes," Cavanaugh told The Herald. "It's a complex situation that we'll continue to be looking very closely at."
Scientists discovered mangroves do not grow when the weather reaches 25 degrees or less The Herald reported. The plant species have been able to branch out because of the warmer weather, and less instances of severe freezing conditions.
"This project enabled us to quantify something that, up until now, had always been anecdotal," John Parker, a co-author of the study and colleague of Cavanaugh's at the Smithsonian in Edgewater, Md told The Herald. "People had been saying: There are mangroves out there where they never used to be. The satellite imagery gave us the historical reference points we needed to confirm the changes. Over this window of the study, we didn't see a lot of hard freezes, which meant the trees were free to grow and make babies," Parker told The Herald. "A hard freeze would kill many trees and seedlings, but maybe three or four out of 100 would survive. It would knock the poleward push way back, but it wouldn't eliminate it."
