Plants more sensitive to drought than realized

From UCLA Newsroom:

Plants all over the world are more sensitive to drought than many experts realized, according to a new study by scientists at UCLA and China’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden. The research will improve predictions of which plant species will survive the increasingly intense droughts associated with global climate change.

The research is reported online by Ecology Letters and will be published in an upcoming print edition.

Predicting how plants will respond to climate change is crucial for their conservation. But good predictions require an understanding of plants’ ability to acclimate to environmental changes, or their “plasticity.” All organisms show some degree of plasticity, but because they’re stationary, plants are especially dependent on this ability.

“Plants are masters of plasticity, changing their size, branching patterns, leaf colors and even their internal biochemistry to adjust to changes in climate,” said Lawren Sack, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College and the study’s senior author.

Little has been known about the degree to which plastic changes might allow plants to endure worsening droughts.

“Plants have evolved this amazing ability to sync with their environment, but they are facing their limits,” said Megan Bartlett, a UCLA doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology and the study’s lead author.

Compiling and analyzing data for numerous species from various ecosystems around the world, Bartlett found that most species accumulate salts in their cell sap to fine-tune their tolerance to seasonal changes in rainfall. But that adjustment only provides a relatively narrow degree of additional drought tolerance.

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