Ry Patton (MS student) just published a paper summarizing historical management records, live-tree C stocks, and C sequestration rates at Huntington Wildlife Forest (Adirondacks, New York) was just published in Forest Ecology and Management. This paper aggregated 70+ years of forest management records and inventory datasets. The take-home message is a positive one for forest management in the current context of carbon management. Forests with a history of intensive management had higher rates of C sequestration (at least into the live-tree C pool), and the potentially negative tradeoffs related to biological and structural diversity declined over time and were largely absent after 30 years. This paper supports the view that some New York forests should be harvested for C storage into long-lived wood products, leaving behind forests that will grow vigorously over the coming decades.
The full paper is available at this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1frtA1L~GwUkrL
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Morgan Furze led a new publication in Plant Cell & Environment focusing on the transport and metabolism of recent photosynthetically fixed C in trees. We pulse labeled trees with 13C carbon dioxide and followed that isotopic tracer in the sugar pools of leaves, phloem, and roots. Trees dynamically allocated 13C‐labelled sugars throughout the aboveground‐belowground continuum. Interestingly, these trees utilized raffinose as a transport molecule, suggesting that they use a polymer-trapping mechanism of phloem loading.
You can read Morgan's study here. Dushan's second PhD thesis chapter was just published by Plant Cell & Environment. Dushan published a global analysis of triose phosphate utilization limitation data in the photosynthesis reactions of plants. Read the paper here.
Nice work Dushan! This week was a remarkable success for research in the lab. One of the premier journals of plant sciences, New Phytologist, published a new edition this week. It contains two papers led by John Drake regarding respiration and carbon allocation in response to experimental warming, a commentary highlighting this pair of papers, and a profile of Dr. Mark Tjoelker, the senior scientific lead on these papers and one of John's mentors.
You can find this edition of New Phytologist here, and the full text of Mark's profile is available here. Mark's profile explains how he got interested in science as a young boy growing up on a dairy farm in Washington State, and his early experiences with plant sciences as an undergraduate researcher at Calvin College. If you have an interest in how people get interested in science, then it is worth your time to read this profile. John just published a paper in New Phytologist with five collaborators. They used a carbon isotopic pulse-chase experiment to label the photosynthate of six trees on a single afternoon, and then they "chased" that label as it was transported and respired by each tree over the following month.
The results indicate that trees have substantial ability to adjust their physiology in response to climate warming. Because of the way trees acclimate their physiology to warming, warming actually does not strongly impact how trees take up, distribute, or respire carbon dioxide. These results indicate that at least some trees can cope with warmer temperatures without negative consequences on their growth or physiology. You can find the paper on "early view" here. Note that this link will probably be broken in a few months. In the longer-term, you can access the paper here. One of John's recent papers was listed as one of the top downloaded papers of 2018 in Global Change Biology. The paper demonstrated how trees adjusted their physiology to cope with an extreme heatwave in Australia. It was downloaded 1,532 times in 2018.
The paper is available here. Reference: Drake, J. E., Tjoelker, M. G., Vårhammar, A., Medlyn, B. E., Reich, P. B., Leigh, A., … Barton, C. V. M. (2018). Trees tolerate an extreme heatwave via sustained transpirational cooling and increased leaf thermal tolerance. Global Change Biology, 24, 2390–2402. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14037 Dushan Kumarathunge (PhD student co-supervised by John) won first prize for the best student poster at COMBIO. COMBIO is a major international meeting of ~5000 scientists from throughout Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, with a focus on molecular biology and physiology. Winning the best student poster is a major award. Congratulations Dushan!
John and his colleagues published a new study in Tree Physiology investigating whether there is substantial within-species variation in tree response to elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide eCO2. The work was led by Mike Aspinwall at the University of North Florida. Measuring photosynthesis in the greenhouse. Photo by Renee Smith. Eucalyptus camaldulensis is an extremely widely-distributed tree species in Australia. These widely distributed species are expected to contain substantial genetic variation, as genotypes are expected to be adapted to their local environmental conditions. This genetic variation may cause some trees to respond differently to eCO2 than others. Growth from small cuttings to saplings. Photos by Renee Smith. Despite the large geographic and climatic distance between the seed sources, we actually found little evidence that different genotypes will respond differently to eCO2. Most of the genotypes displayed higher rates of photosynthesis and growth under eCO2. There was some variation, and genotypes that had large increases in photosynthetic nitrogen use efficiency and large increases in root mass fraction showed the largest growth responses to eCO2.
This work implies that eCO2 is likely to positively affect the growth of trees across the wide range of this species. However we note that other aspects of climate change, notable droughts and heatwaves, are likely to dampen or eliminate this positive effect of eCO2 on tree growth. Our recent Global Change Biology publication demonstrating how some trees successfully cope with an extreme heat wave has received significant media attention. Of special note was the recent story in the Scientific American titled "Trees Sweat to Keep Cool". We were excited to see our work highlighted in this excellent magazine. There were some other interesting press articles as well, including stories from The Guardian, The Futurist, Phys.org, Outdoor Design, Salon, The Weather Channel, and others. Much of this coverage was very good, but some points were missed in some of these stories. (1) We never suggested that these trees need to be genetically engineered to cope with extreme heatwaves. I don't know where the genetic engineering idea crept in, as we don't mention this at any point. The primary message of our work is that these trees already possess a remarkably ability to withstand extreme heat with little detrimental effects. (2) Several stories highlighted how these trees "lost their ability to absorb carbon". We think this misses the central message. Yes, photosynthesis was reduced an average of 40% over the 4-day heatwave; this was entirely expected and is directly predictable from the temperature dependence of photosynthesis. The much more interesting point is that after the heatwave passed, the heatwave trees and the control trees continued to photosynthesize at the same rates. That is, the heatwave had no impact on the trees "ability to absorb carbon" over the long term. We find this remarkable. |
Drake lab
Tree ecophysiology at SUNY-ESF Archives
October 2022
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