Plants in deserts are dying off due to climate change ‘and nothing is replacing them’

Plants in California’s deserts are dying off due to climate change, and the land is being left bare, a new study has shown. 

“Plants are dying, and nothing’s replacing them,” said Stijn Hantson, a project scientist in UCI’s Department of Earth System Science and lead author of the study.  

The research shows how desert areas – where researchers had hoped plants might be more resilient – can be blighted by climate change. 

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Researchers used data from the Landsat satellite mission to measure vegetation in an area of nearly 5,000 square miles surrounding Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

The researchers found that between 1984 and 2017, vegetation cover in desert ecosystems decreased overall by about 35 percent, with mountains seeing a 13 percent vegetation decline.

The decrease has been caused by rainfall which has varied from year to year, along with climbing temperatures ccaused by climate change. 

The researchers had hoped that desert plants would stand a chance against climate change, as they come equipped with drought-tolerant features.

The researchers say that the plants exist right on the edge of what’s habitable, so any environmental shift toward greater extremes is likely to be detrimental. 

“They’re already on the brink,” Hantson said.