“It suggests potential conservation strategies that might help these plants,” Quarles-Chidyagwai said. A strategy called assisted gene flow could reshuffle the plant’s gene variants into new combinations that better match the new climates. Provided / Brandie Quarles-Chidyagwai, UC Davis“We know that shifting seasons are already having negative effects on low-elevation populations,” Gremer said. If the high-elevation plants fared better than the others, it would suggest that even after a century of climate change, they were still well-adapted to their home range. This suggested that despite climate warming, the high-elevation plants are still well-adapted to at least some aspects of their mountain environment.