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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2016
- Title: Integrating developmental and physiological responses of stomata to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide
- Primary Author: Graham Dow (Boston University)
- Additional Authors: Andrew Richardson (Northern Arizona University)
- Abstract:
Plants maintain a fundamental role in the global carbon cycle by acting as a major sink for atmospheric CO2, but the current relationships between vegetation and climate are likely to shift as anthropogenic emissions continue to drive CO2 levels upward. Stomata are microscopic pores on the leaves of plants that regulate carbon uptake by controlling stomatal conductance (gs), which defines the rate of CO2 diffusion into the leaf. gs is acutely sensitive to increasing atmospheric CO2 and stomata will significantly contribute to plant-atmosphere feedbacks on a global scale by reducing long-term gs values, which has the potential to accelerate the accumulation of atmospheric CO2. However, current simulations of gs in large-scale models, like the Community Land Model (CLM), are insufficient to describe the differential stomatal responses that have been observed between plant functional types and do not incorporate developmental feedbacks that will constrain gs over the next century. The core objective of our work is to develop a feedback-sensitive model of gs that incorporates both physiological responses to environmental factors and developmental responses of stomata to atmospheric CO2 that can be coupled with current models of photosynthesis and leaf energy balance in Earth system models to improve long-term climate predictions. We are using a variety of approaches to accomplish this goal, including field measurements of leaf gas-exchange and modeling of gs, eddy covariance data from flux towers at Harvard Forest, and anatomical analysis of leaf herbarium samples from the past 100+ years.
- Research Category: Forest-Atmosphere Exchange
Historical and Retrospective Studies
Physiological Ecology, Population Dynamics, and Species Interactions
