Climate Change alters plants’ functional traits

Climate Change alters plants’ functional traits

Subject: Environment

Section: Climate Change

Context: ‘PhenObs’ — an open network of researchers, citizens, scientists and students studying botanist gardens across the Northern Hemisphere (studied 212 plant species across five botanical gardens in Germany) published the report in New Phytologist June 28.

Content:

• Phenology is the study of growing, leafing, flowering, fruiting and senescence (deterioration) stages in a plant’s life cycle.
• Phenology is one of the key indicators for observing the biological impacts of climate change.
• Scientists have measured traits like plant height, leaf area, carbon and nitrogen content, dry-matter content and seed mass.

Findings of the Research:

Scientists have found:

• Shorter plants are growing, leafing and executing other biological changes earlier than their conventional duration. 
  • have a higher probability of leafing out
  • need less time to reach flowering height than taller plants
• Over 85 per cent of plant species found in temperate ecosystems are herbaceous.
• Leaf area played a crucial role in displaying functional traits.
  • Plants with large leaves leafed out later. But deterioration due to ageing and cell degradation occurred earlier in species with larger leaves.
• They are even more vulnerable to drought conditions or temperature changes.
• They were found to change their flowering or fruiting time and pre-pone it to outcompete the smaller species.
  • However, smaller and thicker leaves seem to be more resistant to drought stress and less sensitive to drop in temperatures.
• Leaf senescence can be triggered by drought during summers or decreasing temperatures in autumn.
• Early stages of initial growth in a plant and leaf unfolding during later stages depended on each other.
• With current Climate change scenarios, plant species are seen advancing their phenology earlier in the year.
  • This likely has an influence on functional characteristics of plants.
  • This will affect competitive hierarchies — an ordered ranking from competitive dominant to competitive subordinate species — with consequences in global biodiversity.