Budding research links climate change and earlier flowering plants

Budding research links climate change and earlier flowering plants

Conover worked closely with UC's Steve Pelikan, a math professor, who crunched all the data from the surveys. Pelikan said he found both the number of earlier-flowering plants and the temperature change from one survey to the next to be statistically significant.

Conover's wild-plant research follows a similar pattern of findings from a recent 30-year garden-plant study in southwestern Ohio (McEwan, et al.). Pelikan points out that Conover's published research is significant because it is one of the first to highlight the earlier flowering phenomena among plants in a natural habitat as opposed to a more-controlled garden setting.

"His is one of the first papers to reach this conclusion when working with native plants in a native setting," said Pelikan.

Further substantiating the work, Conover has found that his observations also aren't unique to the Shaker Trace Wetlands. He's finding similar results as he compares data he collected from a plant survey in 2000 at Oxbow — a wetland at the confluence of the Great Miami and Ohio Rivers that spans southeastern Indiana and southwestern Ohio — to data from today.

He's also noticed the presence of new invasive species in the Oxbow area such as Callery pear, Japanese stiltgrass and Japanese chaff flower.

Conover is no stranger to biological restoration. He's been performing plant surveys, invasive plant control research, and other ecological restoration work as a "hobby" for 25 years. In his day job, Conover teaches several different freshman biology courses to hundreds of UC students in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences each year. He started teaching at UC's old University College in 1990.

University of Cincinnati researcher Denis Conover has cataloged countless plant species in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area in recent years.

(Photo Credit: Photos/Denis Conover)

University of Cincinnati biologist Denis Conover has done extensive plant studies in Hamilton County Parks near Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Oxbow area. Here he studies a specimen at Burnet Woods.

(Photo Credit: Dottie Stover/University of Cincinnati)

Source: University of Cincinnati