A seaweed's response to a warming world

Abstract

For plants, climate change comes with more challenging facets than just increasing temperature. While terrestrial forests are suffering from erratic rainfall, drought and wildfires, marine vegetation is under a different kind of threat. Rapidly melting polar ice caps are causing a surge of freshwater in the seas, lowering the salinity near coastlines. For marine plants adapted to grow in seawater, hyposalinity can be a serious detriment to growth. To assess the possible impact of climate change on marine flora, Li et al. (2019) explored the physiological and transcriptomic response of the kelp Saccharina latissima to increased temperature and hyposaline conditions.