Tag: Climate Change

Climate change profoundly impacts plant communities, for example, by changing the geographic range of some species and locally extinguishing others. Yet these changes take time, maybe a few years, to be observed. This lag between climate and plant communities changes could result from the soil seed bank…

The January 2023 issue of The Plant Cell includes a focus issue on “Climate change and plant stress: From genes to ecosystems”. This timely focus issue has in it commentaries, reviews, and research articles on the topic. I particularly enjoyed reading the two reviews that include short perspectives…

Climate change affects rain patterns and hydrological cycles all over the world, exacerbating water scarcity issues. Root branching is altered by local spatial differences in soil moisture. Indeed, when root tips temporarily lose contact with moisture, root branching stops until the appropriate moisture…

There is a growing number of studies showing the effects of rising temperatures on different aspects of plant life cycles and ecological dynamics. However, little is known about how a warmer world would affect plants' reproductive performance; in other words, how many resources they invest in reproduction…

Alpine ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to climate change since they are experiencing swift temperature increases and rainfall reduction. These changes have been shown to affect different aspects of plant life history, such as phenology and germination. In this exciting research, White and colleagues…

Meet the newest member of the Teaching Tools in Plant Biology family, The Floral Transition and Adaptation to a Changing Environment: from Model Species to Cereal Crops, by Michela Osnato. Freely available in the November 2022 issue of The Plant Cell. You can download the resources here, from the supplemental…

The observation that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” (attributed to philosopher George Santayana) is quite relevant for our efforts to comprehend the impacts of climate change. As we observe temperature and rainfall records being broken with increasing frequency,…

By Raphael Tröscha, Fabian Riesb, Lisa Désirée Westrichb, Felix Willmundb, a Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam-Golm, Germany; b Molecular Genetics of Eukaryotes, University of Kaiserslautern, Paul-Ehrlich-Str. 23, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany Trösch,…