How do plants resist and adapt to climate change? Scientists' Latest Research Reveals the Mechanism
2024-06-20
In the context of global climate change, how plants on Earth resist and adapt has long been a subject of academic attention and ongoing research. The Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released information to the media on June 19, saying that the research team of the Institute and scientific research peers in the United States and colleges have recently found that although climate warming has led to the extension of plant growth season, plants can still maintain a stable balance between leaf growth and aging time - the longer the vegetation turns green, the longer the aging time. Inter annual trend of time allocation based on remote sensing data. The research of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences/the atlas provides extensive use of satellite and ground observation data, revealing that from 2001 to 2020, more than 83% of the vegetation in the northern hemisphere ecosystem still maintains the stability of the time distribution of green leaf growth and senescence. This discovery is of great significance for understanding how vegetation responds to global change through resource allocation and maintains the stability of ecosystem structure and function. The related research papers were recently published in the international academic journal Science Advances. Meng Fandong, the first author and co correspondent of the paper and associate researcher of the ecosystem function and global change team of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that reasonable time allocation is an important subjective initiative to promote individual and social progress. For plants, this time allocation strategy may be formed through natural selection over a long evolutionary process. For a long time, ecological research has focused more on the utilization of material resources by plants, such as the allocation of carbon, water, and nutrients, while lacking sufficient understanding of strategies for utilizing time resources. Analyze the impact of various factors on the timing of three phenological events through PLS-PM. The Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences/Gong Tuhe pointed out that, for this reason, the research team used the time allocation between vegetation leaf growth and senescence as a case to test two possible ways of vegetation phenological time allocation: one is the optimal time allocation adjusted with climate change; The second is to maintain a stable and constant time allocation no matter how the climate changes. The research findings support a constant time allocation strategy, and the validation analysis of different data sources and methods also provides strong evidence for constant time allocation strategies in ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere. This study also found that compared to the leaf senescence period, the leaf growth period of the Northern Hemisphere ecosystem is longer, and the time allocation ratio of the two is about 1.27. In addition, the time allocation of green leaf growth and senescence periods is altitude dependent in space, and in high-altitude areas such as the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, this ratio significantly increases with increasing altitude. The spatial distribution and relationship of the end of growing season (EOS) observed and simulated in northern ecosystems. Later, the research team further explored the mechanism driving this time allocation strategy and found that early phenological events had a significant positive transmission effect on subsequent events, for example, early turning green and early withering and yellowing of leaves, so a longer leaf growth period would lead to a longer aging period, thus maintaining the same proportion between the two. Co corresponding author of the paper and researcher Chen Anping from Colorado State University in the United States believes that this study reveals a resource utilization strategy of vegetation that was not fully recognized by people before, highlighting the resistance of vegetation phenology to climate change. This study also contributes to predicting vegetation aging time. The research team has constructed a simple autumn phenology prediction model based on the theoretical framework of time allocation. This model can explain 58% of the changes in autumn vegetation withering and yellowing time in the northern hemisphere, greatly solving the problem of insufficient accuracy in predicting autumn phenology models. Meng Fandong stated that the research team will continue to monitor the time allocation characteristics of plants at different temporal and spatial scales and improve their theoretical framework to further understand their impact on the stability of ecosystem structure and function. (Lai Xin She)
Edit:Xiong Dafei Responsible editor:Li Xiang
Source:CNS.cn
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