Photo source: © Elizabeth Haslam
Excerpts;
California sagebrush in the southern part of the state will adjust better to climate change than sagebrush populations in the north, according to UC Irvine researchers in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology affiliated with the Center for Environmental Biology.
The results of their study, which appears online in Global Change Biology, will assist land management and policy decisions concerning coastal sage scrub restoration.
California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), also known as “cowboy cologne,” is the fragrant gray-green shrub that once filled area ranch land. It’s found on coastal hillsides for more than 400 miles along California’s Pacific coast. Only about 10 percent of its original habitat remains, the rest having been converted to human use, and is home to a number of endangered species, including the California gnatcatcher, which depend on plants like sagebrush…
