Everingham Susan E, Offord Catherine A, Sabot Manon E B, Moles Angela T
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences UNSW Sydney New South Wales Australia.
The Australian Institute of Botanical Science, The Australian PlantBank, Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan Mount Annan New South Wales Australia.
Ecol Evol. 2024 Mar 19;14(3):e10941. doi: 10.1002/ece3.10941. eCollection 2024 Mar.
Adaptation to changing conditions is one of the strategies plants may use to survive in the face of climate change. We aimed to determine whether plants' leaf morphological and physiological traits/gas exchange variables have changed in response to recent, anthropogenic climate change. We grew seedlings from resurrected historic seeds from ex-situ seed banks and paired modern seeds in a common-garden experiment. Species pairs were collected from regions that had undergone differing levels of climate change using an emerging framework-Climate Contrast Resurrection Ecology, allowing us to hypothesise that regions with greater changes in climate (including temperature, precipitation, climate variability and climatic extremes) would be greater trait responses in leaf morphology and physiology over time. Our study found that in regions where there were greater changes in climate, there were greater changes in average leaf area, leaf margin complexity, leaf thickness and leaf intrinsic water use efficiency. Changes in leaf roundness, photosynthetic rate, stomatal density and the leaf economic strategy of our species were not correlated with changes in climate. Our results show that leaves do have the ability to respond to changes in climate, however, there are greater inherited responses in morphological leaf traits than in physiological traits/variables and greater responses to extreme measures of climate than gradual changes in climatic means. It is vital for accurate predictions of species' responses to impending climate change to ensure that future climate change ecology studies utilise knowledge about the difference in both leaf trait and gas exchange responses and the climate variables that they respond to.
适应不断变化的环境是植物在面对气候变化时可能采用的生存策略之一。我们旨在确定植物的叶片形态和生理特征/气体交换变量是否因近期的人为气候变化而发生了变化。我们在一个共同花园实验中种植了来自异地种子库中复活的历史种子的幼苗，并将其与现代种子配对。利用一个新兴框架——气候对比复活生态学，从经历了不同程度气候变化的地区收集物种对，这使我们能够假设，随着时间的推移，气候（包括温度、降水、气候变异性和极端气候）变化较大的地区，叶片形态和生理特征的响应会更大。我们的研究发现，在气候变化较大的地区，平均叶面积、叶缘复杂度、叶厚度和叶片内在水分利用效率的变化更大。我们研究物种的叶圆度、光合速率、气孔密度和叶片经济策略的变化与气候的变化无关。我们的结果表明，叶片确实有能力对气候变化做出反应，然而，叶片形态特征的遗传响应比生理特征/变量更大，对极端气候措施的响应比对气候平均值的逐渐变化更大。为了准确预测物种对即将到来的气候变化的反应，确保未来的气候变化生态学研究利用有关叶片特征和气体交换反应的差异以及它们所响应的气候变量的知识至关重要。
