A creamy jasmine wildflower once common across the Colorado mountains may be vanishing forever as climate change brings warmer and drier conditions.

That’s the conclusion unveiled Wednesday by scientists who conducted a 25-year experiment above Crested Butte near Gothic at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory tracking northern rock jasmine, a delicate white-petaled species also known as fairy candelabra. These wildflowers, a type of nonfragrant primrose, are typically found at elevations between 5,000 feet and 17,000 feet across the northern hemisphere.

The scientists simulated conditions that conservative climate change models indicate will be likely, continuing a trend that a preponderance of scientists have linked to climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping “greenhouse” pollution.

Their results show that a temperature increase of an additional 3 degrees Fahrenheit would cause the “local extinction” of northern rock jasmine in the area above Crested Butte, where abundant wildflowers have long been celebrated for their beauty.

“My work shows this amount of warming causes local extinction, which could lead to more widespread extinction,” said University of Colorado evolutionary ecologist Anne Marie Panetta, the lead author of a research paper published Wednesday, after peer review, in a scientific journal called Science Advances.

“This flower is likely an indicator for other species,” Panetta said. “Maybe you don’t care about this one wildflower going away. But its decline is an indication of likely future declines of other species. And then you start seeing the whole ecosystem change.”

The research ranks among the first experiments that identify how warming in an area may affect a species, leading to extinction.

A team including scientists from the University of California used 15 infrared heaters suspended from tripods, spread out across a meadow at an elevation of about 9,500 feet, to simulate climate warming by 3 degrees.

Meanwhile, the average temperatures in the Rocky Mountains already were increasing. Panetta said the average temperatures outside the experimental area increased by 2 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit during the experiment.

Scientists working at the lab measured how heating caused snow to melt earlier, by up to one month, and how this earlier melting combined with higher temperatures cause decreased soil moisture — leading to a dwindling of the wildflowers.

The scientists also documented a decline in northern rock jasmine using control plots that were not heated. But that decline was less pronounced than in the plots where temperatures were raised using the heaters.

“We experimentally warmed the system. We saw local extinction. This predicts that, when natural systems warm as a result of climate change, it will cause local extinctions,” Panetta said. “We are already starting to see evidence of this in the control plot, indicating that our experiment is making realistic predictions about the real world.”

This Warming Meadow experiment has been one of the longest-running climate change experiments in the world. Funding the research has been a challenge. The National Science Foundation helped support it. Scientists said their current funding situation is bleak and that they may not be able to continue the experiment as planned.