Spring wildflowers may face challenges in a warming climate.

That’s according to researchers who combined their findings with historical observations collected by philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau.

Conservation biologists Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie of the University of Maine and Richard Primack of Boston University presented Thoreau’s scientific observations from the 1850s in Concord, Massachusetts to Mason Heberling, assistant curator of botany at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The data included tree and wildflower leaf-out dates measured for 37 separate years between 1852 and 2018

 

Continue reading at University of Maine.

Image via University of Maine.