Survey Of 8,000 Tropical Plant Species Across Continents Shows Flowering Times Now Months Early & Late

Tropical flowers are blooming months earlier or later than they used to because of climate breakdown, with potentially “cascading impacts across ecosystems”, according to a study of 8,000 plants dating back 200 years. Researchers looked at flowers from a range of countries, including Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana and Thailand, home to the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, but also the most understudied.

The Brazilian amaranth tree flowers 80 days later than it did in the 1950s, while the Ghanaian rattlepod shrub’s flowering period shifted 17 days earlier between the 50s and 90s, according to a study of museum specimens. It was previously thought that tropical regions – where temperatures fluctuate less over the course of the year – would not be so affected by the climate crisis in terms of the timing of flowering. This hypothesis has been proved wrong, said the lead researcher Skylar Graves from the University of Colorado Boulder, who added that “nowhere on Earth is unaffected by climate change”.

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The entire tropical ecosystem is likely to be negatively affected. “These changes, and more in turn, fracture communities and food chains,” the researchers wrote in the paper published in the journal Plos One, describing the changes as potentially causing “cascading impacts across entire ecosystems”. The tropics is a “large blind spot regarding understanding the global impacts of climate change”, they wrote. It is likely that these changes have wider impacts on the ecosystem as flowering falls out of sync with the cycles of fruit-eating, seed-dispersing animals (meaning there is not fruit available for them to eat when they are expecting it) as well as other plants and pollinators.

If, for example, a flower needs to be pollinated by a migratory bird but that bird is only around for a few days a year and the timing no longer lines up, the flower won’t get pollinated and the bird won’t get the nectar to drink. “Ecosystems are very delicate webs of interactions, and if there is one element out of sync, especially with the plants, which are the basis of the ecosystem, things can fall apart at every level of the ecosystem,” said Graves. Many animals that rely on these plants are primates, which are already considered at risk.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/25/tropical-plants-flower-shifted-months-climate-breakdown-aoe