PHA Members: $10; Non-Members: $20.

Climate change will be one of the top threats to biodiversity in the 21st century with potential to cause declines, extinctions, or range shifts for many species, disrupt key ecological interactions between plants and their mutualist partners like pollinators and mycorrhizal fungi, and lead to substantial changes in the composition and functioning of ecosystems. Understanding these ecological dynamics will be key to successfully managing and conserving biodiversity under the novel conditions developing across many regions of the world, including New England. This lecture will explore the development of the current New England flora following the last Ice Age and consider how plant survival through past episodes of major climate change might inform conservation strategies for the current era and the emerging “future flora” of New England. The role that humans might play in supporting the most at-risk plant species via approaches like “assisted migration” will also be considered, along with how static terms like “native” and “non-native” might need to be reenvisioned against a backdrop of shifting distributions and change in the regional flora.

This lecture will take place at the Far Barn. Please park at the Visitor Center.