Land plant sensitivity to global warming in the Early Jurassic

In this paper, published in Nature Geoscience (2019), Slater and co-authors describe how rapid volcanogenic global warming occurred 183 million years ago triggered a drop in the land plant richness and biodiversity. During this extreme greenhouse moment, seasonality was enhanced, and only plants adopted to drought could spread and proliferate. A correlation with the marine record shows how terrestrial ecosystems are more sensitive to temperature changes than marine ones. The study of these shifts in the vegetation communities in the deep past can provide important data for understanding potential future long-term ecological changes related to anthropogenic climate warming.