Description:
Rising temperatures force many living organisms to migrate to cooler areas, while new organisms arrive. Such movements involve all species, including plants. Some species will seek higher altitudes, others will move further polewards. In temperate regions, plant and tree species can migrate naturally by 25 to 40 kilometres a century. However if, for example, there was a 3°C increase in temperature over a hundred year period in a particular region, the conditions in that area would undergo dramatic change, equivalent in ecological terms to a shift of several hundred kilometres (Jouzel and Debroise 2007).