"There's a lot of concern": Warm winters impacting Vancouver’s beloved cherry blossoms
Vancouver’s unusually warm winter has stumped typical winter plans, with many skiers and snowboarders unable to hit the slopes. But it turns out that the effects of the mild winter could bleed into Spring, too.
According to Elizabeth Wolkovich, a professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at UBC, Vancouver’s beloved cherry blossoms could take a hit from the warm weather as they need the cold winter conditions to trigger growth.
“They need a certain amount of winter cold,” said Wolkovich. “After they receive enough winter cold, they’ll respond to spring warmth, and they’ll flower normally.”
It’s not all panic, though. The milder winter Vancouver experienced over the new year doesn’t mean that the annual pink wonderland won’t occur in the city, but that we will “probably see the cherries bloom early.”
While earlier cherry blossoms might not seem like a cause for concern, Wolkovich shared that it represents a larger issue for crop growth and agriculture.
“There’s a real agricultural impact that people are worried about,” she said. “[They’re] very concerned about what happens if we have warm enough winters where the plants don’t get enough chilling. It could be that they don’t get the full crop.”
There are concerns that crops will grow earlier because of the warm weather. Wolkovich shared that this means that crops may “fall early” and would risk being lost to a Spring frost.
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The possible agricultural outcomes are not the only concern according to Wolkovich. She shared that understanding the effects of the warm winter on cherry blossoms could help paint a picture of how plants and trees respond to climate change.
“The basic model of what it takes for cherries to flower in the spring is the same basic biological model for what it takes for almost every other temperate tree to leaf out,” Wolkovich said.
“As growing seasons have gotten longer, most trees temperate trees and boreal around the planet have started to leaf out two to three weeks on average earlier with anthropogenic warming.”
Knowing how early cherry blossoms bloom and trees start to leaf out helps us determine how much forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere, and as such, “can help predict other climate change predictions.”
Wolkovich shared that an accurate model for how warming winters affect cherry blossoms and other plants is crucial for understanding future climate change patterns and effects.
“We could actually see increased climate change in the future if these models we have are fundamentally inaccurate,” she said. “Of course, increased climate change means more fires, more extreme events, and a lot more for all of us to handle as a society.”
In her efforts to improve the plant models that can inform us about climate change patterns, Wolkovich is running a global contest at UBC that has participants predict the peak bloom dates for cherry blossoms in five different cities.
She hopes more people will join the competition to “try to help model these events better so that we can start to build the models needed as the planet continues to warm.”
“It’s a great way to get involved and start thinking about the impacts of climate change on our spring events and also the biology behind these events and how it might be changing,” she said.
With files from Nikitha Martins.
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