• Co-occurring species often differ in their leaf lifespan (LL) and it remains unclear how such variation is maintained in a competitive context. Here we test the hypothesis that leaves of long-LL species yield a greater return in carbon (C) fixed per unit C or nutrient invested by the plant than those of short-LL species. • For 10 sympatric woodland species, we assessed three-dimensional shoot...

Mangroves are one of the most productive and biologically diverse ecosystems, with unique plants, animals, microorganisms adapted to harsh coastal environments. Although fungi widely distributed in mangrove ecosystem they playing an important role decomposition organic matter, their genomic profiles still poorly understood. In this study, we isolated seven Ascomycota ( Westerdykella dispersa F0...

Growth pattern dynamics lie at the heart of morphogenesis. Here, we investigate the growth of plant leaves. We compute the conformal transformation that maps the contour of a leaf at a given stage onto the contour of the same leaf at a later stage. Based on the mapping we predict the local displacement field in the leaf blade and find it to agree with the experimentally measured displacement fi...

ABSTRACT The effects of plant age, leaf age, and leaf position on race-nonspecific resistance against Phytophthora infestans were investigated in a series of field and controlled environment experiments with five different potato (Solanum tuberosum) cultivars. Leaf position proved to be the most significant factor; apical leaves were far more resistant to late blight than basal leaves. Plant ag...

UNLABELLED PREMISE OF THE STUDY Because plant identification demands extensive knowledge and complex terminologies, even professional botanists require significant time in the field for mastery of the subject. As plant leaves are normally regarded as possessing useful characteristics for species identification, leaf recognition through images can be considered an important research issue for...

A lotus leaf retains water repellency after repeated condensation in nature but becomes sticky to water drops after condensation on a fixed cold plate. Our experiments show that mechanical vibration can be used to overcome the energy barrier for transition from the sticky Wenzel state to the nonsticking Cassie state, and the threshold for the dewetting transition follows a scaling law comparing...