Modifications of the design and calibration procedure of a diffusion porometer permit determinations of stomatal resistance which agree well with results obtained by leaf energy balance. The energy balance and the diffusion porometer measurements indicate that the boundary layer resistances of leaves in the field are substantially less than those predicted from heat transport formulas based on ...

BACKGROUND The effect of herbivory on plant fitness varies widely. Understanding the causes of this variation is of considerable interest because of its implications for plant population dynamics and trait evolution. We experimentally defoliated the annual herb Arabidopsis thaliana in a natural population in Sweden to test the hypotheses that (a) plant fitness decreases with increasing damage, ...

A fundamental goal in ecology is to link variation in species function to performance, but functional trait-performance investigations have had mixed success. This indicates that less commonly measured functional traits may more clearly elucidate trait-performance relationships. Despite the potential importance of leaf vein traits, which are expected to be related to resource delivery rates and...

Leaf sizes in angiosperm trees vary by more than 3 orders of magnitude, from a few mm to over 1 m. This large morphological freedom is, however, only expressed in small trees, and the observed leaf size range declines with tree height, forming well-defined upper and lower boundaries. The vascular system of tall trees that distributes the products of photosynthesis connects distal parts of the p...

F-box proteins are part of one of the largest families of regulatory proteins that play important roles in protein degradation. In plants, F-box proteins are functionally very diverse, and only a small subset has been characterized in detail. Here, we identified a novel F-box protein FBX92 as a repressor of leaf growth in Arabidopsis. Overexpression of AtFBX92 resulted in plants with smaller le...

Background: The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship between the sexual reproduction and the resource allocation in a natural Polygonatum humile population grown in a temperate mixed forest gap. For this aim, the plant size, the node which flower was formed, the fruiting rate, and the dry weight of each organ were monitored from June 2014 to August 2015. Results: Firstly, in 3–13-l...

Festuca L. comprises perennial herbs and about 450 species. It belongs to the tribe Poeae R. Br. (= Festucaceae Dumort), subfamily Pooideae of Poaceae. These species are different in leaf size, life duration and lamina width. The genus is divided into two groups based on lamina width: fine-leaved and broad-leaved. In this study, leaf anatomy of F. akhanii, F. elwendiana,F. heterophylla, F. sulc...

More than 5,000 measurements from 1,943 plant species were used to explore the scaling relationships among the foliar surface area and the dry, water, and nitrogen/phosphorus mass of mature individual leaves. Although they differed statistically, the exponents for the relationships among these variables were numerically similar among six species groups (ferns, graminoids, forbs, shrubs, trees, ...