Outside of Chapel Hill, a small team known to their lab as the Partridge Peaple, is hard at work in the early hours of the morning. Their work focuses on a single species of plant, Chamaecrista fasciculata, aka the common partridge pea. You may have seen this cheerful annual in gardens or growing wild in prairies and along roadsides. Partridge pea is native to the eastern to central United States and produces large yellow flowers throughout the summer. The partridge pea’s broad range makes it an excellent model for studying the impact of a changing climate. 

“Most forecasts of how species’ ranges will shift with climate change ignore the potential for evolutionary change to happen,” explains Sheth. “The fact that populations are adapted to unique local climates, and can have the capacity to rapidly adapt to changing climates might influence the overall response of a species.”

Consider how different the summers are in New York opposed to those in North Carolina. And yet, the partridge pea thrives in both environments due to genetic variation and local adaptation within the species. Genetic variation and adaptations to the local environment are difficult factors to incorporate when predicting changes in plant ranges due to climate change.

To study these factors, members of the lab head out early to beat the heat at their common garden field site. Hexagonal plots of partridge pea grow across the garden, many of which are surrounded by an open top clear plastic chamber. The open top allows pollinators to access the plants, while the clear plastic walls act like a miniature greenhouse, warming the plants by several degrees Celsius. 

The researchers track the germination, growth, flowering and seed production of the plants. Each individual plant has a tag that tells researchers where the seed originated. They’ll continue to collect data and seeds from the plants throughout the summer until the plants’ annual life cycle ends. 

Collaboration plays a crucial role in this National Science Foundation funded project led by Dr. Jill Anderson at the University of Georgia. The garden in North Carolina is one of four involved in this project. Research teams in New York, Georgia and Florida have planted and tracked the same seeds in their own experimental gardens, allowing researchers to compare which plants grow, and reproduce across the species’ natural range. 

The project stretches across the partridge pea’s range. At Michigan State University, faculty member Emily Josephs’ group is performing genetic analyses to better understand how the different plant populations are related. 

Further south at the University of Georgia, Associate Professor Megan DeMarche’s group is leading modeling efforts to assess how evolutionary processes influence forecasts of species’ range shifts with climate change. Director of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, Jenny Cruse-Sanders, is supporting the project’s conservation goals of applying what the team learns from the partridge pea to vulnerable plants in the southeast that are harder to study.

Back in North Carolina, Dr. Susana Wadgymar’s lab at Davidson College led the project’s extensive field collections efforts. Her team collected seeds from natural populations across the native range of partridge pea and carefully crossed plants in their greenhouse to produce seeds for this experiment. Two undergraduates from Davidson College have also joined the Sheth lab in the field as part of a summer research experience for undergraduates (REU). This REU connects students from primarily undergraduate institutions with larger research schools, and offers networking with graduate students and postdocs for students interested in pursuing advanced degrees.

Their work has important implications for plant conservation. In order to save a rare or endangered species, scientists must have access to risk assessment tools that help predict population persistence with climate change. 

This post was originally published in Plant and Microbial Biology.