Researcher ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-3836-9077

Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Biology

Reader 1

Diane M. Thomson

Reader 2

Erin Jones

Rights Information

© 2023 Shreya Dasari

Abstract

Predictability is a crucial element of how successful organisms are in surviving in a specific environment. Annual plants, for example, decide whether to germinate based on the environmental conditions they experience in the fall, but it is being able to predict the conditions in the spring that ensures their ability to survive and reproduce for the next growing cycle. Factors such as precipitation and temperature have historically followed a seasonal pattern and play a significant role in influencing when annual germination begins. However, with increasingly irregular weather events as a result of climate change and global warming, there may have been changes in rainfall and temperature patterns that could be influencing the timing and success of annual germination. Using data collected from the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCDC), we conducted correlation analyses to determine how the relationship between time of year, precipitation, and temperature has potentially changed across 128 years in Claremont, California. Our goal was to examine both the relationship between precipitation levels and the relationship between temperature in the fall and the spring and assess how both of these respective relationships have changed in recent years compared to the past. We predicted that precipitation and temperature respectively in the fall would be correlated with precipitation and temperature in the spring. However, we predicted that these relationships would potentially be weaker in recent years than in the past due to increasingly irregular weather patterns as a result of climate change.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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