To assess how much of Earth’s surface is covered by vegetation, the research team used characteristics of growing plants: healthy plants absorb a lot of red light and reflect a lot of near-infrared light. Using satellite measurements of light at these wavelengths, scientists can determine whether a piece of land is covered with growing plants.
The researchers found that the area covered by vegetation in the Antarctic Peninsula has increased from less than one square kilometer in 1986 to about 12 square kilometers in 2021. The speed of vegetation expansion in the period from 2016 to 2021 was about 33% higher than the entire four-decade study period. “These numbers shocked us,” said study co-author Thomas Rowland, an environmental scientist at the University of Exeter in the UK. “The speed of change in this extremely isolated and vulnerable environment causes us concern.”
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Jasmine Lee, a British environmental protection scientist, calls the research very important and says that other studies have found evidence that the vegetation on the peninsula is changing in response to climate change; But the new study is the first to take a comprehensive approach to examine the entire region.
The authors’ past visits to the Antarctic Peninsula led them to believe that most of the vegetation is composed of mosses. “When mosses take over landscapes that were previously covered in ice, they create a layer of soil that provides habitat for other plant life,” Roland says. “There is huge potential here for the proliferation of non-native and possibly invasive species.”
