Leaf size and venation show remarkable diversity across dicotyledons, and are key determinants of plant adaptation in ecosystems past and present. Here we present global scaling relationships of venation traits with leaf size. Across a new database for 485 globally distributed species, larger leaves had major veins of larger diameter, but lower length per leaf area, whereas minor vein traits we...

Across plant species, leaves vary enormously in their size and their venation architecture, of which one major function is to replace water lost to transpiration. The leaf hydraulic conductance (K(leaf)) represents the capacity of the transport system to deliver water, allowing stomata to remain open for photosynthesis. Previous studies showed that K(leaf) relates to vein density (vein length p...

Two airborne laser scanning datasets with leaf-on and leaf-off conditions were used to compare parameters derived from crown structure metrics and intensity data. Five deciduous species and six coniferous species were collected at the Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle, Washington, USA. Linear (LDA) and quadratic (QDA) discriminate functions were used to classify these selected species groups. ...

We explore the effect of inter-seasonal spectral variation on the potential for automated classification methods to accurately discern species of trees and lianas from high-resolution spectral data collected at the leaf level at two tropical forest sites. Through the application of data reduction techniques and classification methods to leaf-level spectral data collected at sites in Panama, we ...

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...