In this blog post Frederick Lubbe, postdoc at Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, presents his work ‘New opportunities for grassland species in warming temperate winters’. He talks about the importance of winter for plants, shows how plants cope with winter conditions and shares how he enjoys working in unusual ecological topics.
About the paper
Climate change is happening everywhere and all year round, but there are many times of the year we do not know as much about, such as winter of temperate regions. This lack of knowledge is even greater for herbaceous perennial species because they are often unseen (or unnoticed) during the winter because many of them lose their vulnerable aboveground structures and regrow them in the spring. However, with warming winters, more herbaceous species may have green and living aboveground structures during the winter.
To better understand how herbaceous perennial species of temperate regions may be able to respond and even benefit from warming winters, we measured freezing tolerance, photosynthetic ability, and economic leaf traits for three common species to see if they can survive the freezing temperatures that will continue to occur (even if less frequently) during warming winters, continue to acquire carbon and photosynthesize even with fluctuating conditions, and have traits in winter different than in summer to better take advantage of the different conditions of the two different seasons. We also surveyed green and brown/dead leaf cover of species in a local lawn to assess how many species have green leaves and how their phenological patterns may differ.
This paper is unique because of our inclusion of winter and summer conditions, as well as the use of traits, physiology, and phenology. We found that the three target species were all capable of tolerating freezing and photosynthesizing (even if less than in summer) and had more conservative leaf traits (smaller and tougher leaves) in winter than in summer, likely to survive the harsher and more strongly fluctuating conditions.
About the research
Winter is important. We learned that phenology, physiology, and trait strategy are three vital components of plant strategy that can combine for plant species to survive and thrive, perhaps at the expense of other species. We also saw that many plants can do more than we think, the freezing tolerance of small common plants was quite high and many more species were taking advantage of the warmer winter conditions than we expected. It is still important to note many species may still be vulnerable and had since left our study site. This is the first thorough look to characterize wintergreen leaves of perennial herbs and identify how they are a unique phenological type/leaf type. We were surprised to find so many wintergreen species and more than before (from observations 20 years prior for Central Europe).
There is still a lot to learn about wintergreen strategies of herbs. We don’t know the exact mechanisms of freezing tolerance, which probably vary heavily depending on location and species. We also do not know much about variation in phenology or growth form (such as stem architecture/leaf arrangement), nor in the comparison of summer versus leaf traits, of wintergreen species, as well as what this variation means in terms of the response to changing winter conditions. For the future we will need to study more species, include carbohydrates, and have more details assessments of phenological strategy and leaf arrangement.
About the author
I got into winter ecology when I joined Hugh Henry’s lab for my Ph.D. in southern Canada, in this region, we did snow removal, but different places have different kinds of winter climate change. When I moved to Czech Republic for my postdoc (where I still work), I had to find a new way to study winter climate change. It was interesting to create a study really focused on winter warming as more of an advantage with infrequent (but important) freezing conditions with a greater loss of cold temperatures (that are still damaging!).
In my research more broadly I study a variety of things, with more of a focus on belowground storage traits, so this study is a little unusual for me and actually an initial step toward understanding how carbon storage changes under climate change and warming winters. I am especially interested to look belowground to understand more about what warming winters and potential increased carbon acquisition means for carbon storage.
I am really happy to be involved in a lot of unusual topics in ecology, including studying the belowground lives of plants in general but also with focuses on winter ecology (not always easy to study, but very important), storage carbohydrates (entirely too complex and multifunctional), and the genus Oxalis as a model group to understand belowground storage organ diversity (they are little monsters). It’s a lot of work and sometimes confusing, but always interesting.
Like this blog post? Read the research here.
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