Drought is the main selection agent in Mediterranean ecosystems and it has been suggested as an important evolutionary force responsible for population diversification in these types of environments. However, population divergence in quantitative traits can be driven by either natural selection, genetic drift or both. To investigate the roles of these forces on among-population divergence in ec...

Plants of nutrient-poor, arid environments often have leaf traits that include small size, sclerophylly, long life span, low nutrient concentration, and low photosynthetic rate. Hence, the success of two large-leaved palmettos in peninsular Florida's seasonally xeric, nutrient-impoverished uplands seems anomalous, given that their leaves are orders of magnitude larger than the leaves of sympatr...

to evaluate morphological markers linked with drought stress resistance for screening almond genotypes in the breeding programs the effect of drought stress was studied on six nominated almond genotypes seedlings. the six pre-selected water stress mimposed almond genotypes included: homozygote sweet (butte from university of california), heterozygote sweet (shahrood12, shahrood18, shahrood21 an...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY In dioecious species, selection should favor different leaf sizes in males and females whenever the sexes experience distinct environments or constraints such as different costs of reproduction. We took advantage of a long-term experimental study of Ocotea tenera (Lauraceae), a dioecious understory tree in Monteverde, Costa Rica, to explore leaf size differences between gen...

We examined open-grown Acer mono Maxim. trees of different sizes to test the hypotheses that (1) hydraulic limitation increases with tree size, thereby reducing photosynthesis, and (2) photosynthetic water- and nitrogen-use efficiencies change with tree size. Maximum net assimilation rate per unit dry mass was significantly lower in large trees than in small trees, whereas leaf nitrogen concent...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Corner's rule states that thicker twigs bear larger leaves. The exact nature of this relationship and why it should occur has been the subject of numerous studies. It is obvious that thicker twigs should support greater total leaf area ([Formula: see text]) for hydraulical and mechanical reasons. But it is not obvious why mean leaf size ([Formula: see text]) should scale pos...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Leaves expand during a given period of time until they reach their final size and form, which is called determinate growth. Duration of leaf expansion is stable when expressed in thermal-time and in the absence of stress, and consequently it is often proposed that it is controlled by a robust programme at the plant scale. The usual hypothesis is that growth cessation occurs ...

Leaf expansion in the fast-growing tree, Populus x euramericana was stimulated by elevated [CO(2)] in a closed-canopy forest plantation, exposed using a free air CO(2) enrichment technique enabling long-term experimentation in field conditions. The effects of elevated [CO(2)] over time were characterized and related to the leaf plastochron index (LPI), and showed that leaf expansion was stimula...

During the development of woody twigs, the growth in leaf may or may not be proportional to the growth in stem. The presence or absence of a synchronicity between these two phenologies may reflect differences in life history adaptive strategies concerning carbon gain. We hypothesized that sun-adapted species are more likely to be less synchronous between growths in total leaf area (TLA) and ste...