The absence of large herbivores after the extinction of the dinosaurs changed the evolution of plants. The 25 million years of large herbivore absence slowed down the evolution of new plant species. Defensive features such as spines regressed and fruit sizes increased.
Airborne pollen may induce annoying congestion for some, but a new paper shows that these grains may provide a new way of looking at the climate over 300 million years into the fossil record.
Many countries have set carbon neutrality as a policy goal, but according to a new study by an international team of researchers from Austria, Japan, and the US, there are various risks associated with the reduction of greenhouse gases, especially in the agriculture, forestry, and land use sectors, that need to be considered when formulating mitigation strategies.
Local and Indigenous communities warn of a significant decrease in the abundance of wild edible plants and mushrooms that negatively impacts their nutrition and food security, from local to global scales.
Seven to nine percent of all vascular plant species occurring in Europe are globally threatened. The researchers combined Red Lists of endangered plant species in Europe with data on their global distribution. It helps assess the overall level of threat to plant species and thus supports the basis of international nature conservation activities.
A new study provides key insights into how and why tree populations migrate in response to climate change at the continental scale.
Feeling the heat: Steroid hormones contribute to the heat stress resistance of plants. Plants, like other organisms, can be severely affected by heat stress. To increase their chances of survival, they activate the heat shock response, a molecular pathway also employed by human and animal cells for stress protection. Researchers have now discovered that plant steroid hormones can promote this response in plants.
Scientists have developed ways to decipher effects of the CO2 rise during the past 100 years on metabolic fluxes of the key plant species in peatlands, mosses.
Most organisms follow a timetable – when to reproduce, when to migrate, so on so forth! The timing of such key periodic life events is known as phenology and is crucial for organism’s survival and their contributions to ecosystem functions. One of the most reported responses of organisms to contemporary climate change is shifts in their phenology. Ecologists have already shown that phenology of many plants are advancing due to climate change, for instance, many plants are flowering earlier during the growing season. But little was known how plant phenological changes aboveground matches with plant phenological changes belowground due to climate change.
The world is warming quickly with no indication of slowing down. This could be catastrophic for the production of food crops, particularly in already warm areas.
