The natural world is alive with dialogue. Plants participate in conversations both above- and belowground. Their petals shout to pollinators, beckoning them with bright colors, sweet scents and food. Their roots whisper with the fungi with whom they exchange nutrients. Mycorrhizal fungi, which form symbiotic relationships with neighboring plants, draw carbon down deep into the soil while facilitating the plants’ uptake of beneficial carbohydrates and minerals.
But the form this botanical discourse takes is shifting in today’s warming world. Researchers led by John Harte, an ecologist at University of California, Berkeley, artificially warmed a subalpine meadow near Gothic, Colorado, for 29 years — one of the longest-running climate change experiments in the world.
Scientists used heat lamps to warm test plots, increasing the soil temperature by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2ºC). Under current climate models, that’s an optimistic estimate for average global temperature rise by 2100; by comparison, state models show Colorado could warm by more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers documented changes on the surface and underground in the artificially warmed plots. The shifting temperatures had an impact on which plants flourished in the meadows and which ones faded, with ripple effects that extended throughout the ecosystem to soil and local wildlife — even the likelihood and behavior of wildfires.
Lara Souza, a plant ecologist at the University of Oklahoma, and her colleagues studied what happens in the dirt when a meadow shifts from grasses and forbs to patches of sagebrush. Their results, which were published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year, suggest that a different kind of dialogue is happening now between plants and fungi, one that Souza describes as “decoupling.” As mycorrhizal fungi are replaced by saprotrophic fungi, which digest dead organic matter, the conversation between plants and soil shifts, moving from a two-way exchange, where nutrients flow both ways, to a more one-sided relationship. This has serious implications for the remaining flowers and their ability to thrive.
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This article appeared in the August 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “When wildflowers speak.”
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