Flowers as Climate Engineers

Flowering plants (angiosperms) reshaped Earth by increasing transpiration, enabling new biomes (rainforests, prairies), and creating coastal habitats (mangroves, seagrasses) that regulate climate and support fisheries. The evolutionary spread of flowers altered water and carbon cycles and helped build the ecosystems that underpin modern climate regulation and human food systems. — If plants are recognized as active climate engineers, conservation and land‑use policy should prioritize the ecological processes (like transpiration and coastal flowering habitats) that sustain climate resilience, not just carbon counts.