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6 - Wood anatomy and climate change

from Section 2 - Adaptation, speciation and extinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2011

By
P. Baas  and
E. A. Wheeler
Edited by
Trevor R. Hodkinson ,
Michael B. Jones ,
Stephen Waldren  and
John A. N. Parnell
P. Baas
Affiliation:
National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Leiden
E. A. Wheeler
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University, NC, USA
Trevor R. Hodkinson
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
Michael B. Jones
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
Stephen Waldren
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
John A. N. Parnell
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Summary

Abstract

This chapter reviews the potential of comparative wood anatomy for climate reconstruction and for assessing the possible risks of global warming to extant woody plants. There is growing evidence that wood evolution has been driven by functional adaptations to climate change in vessel-bearing woody angiosperms, giving rise to multiple parallelisms and reversals in vessel, fibre, parenchyma and ray modifications. Despite this homoplasy, wood anatomical character complexes are phylogenetically constrained, often allowing different clades at various levels of the taxonomic hierarchy (families, genera and groups of closely related species) to be reliably identified by wood anatomical attributes alone. Examples are presented of how wood anatomical characters can be used as climate proxies, especially for mean annual temperature (MAT), and its covariables latitude and altitude. One of the great challenges of modern wood research is to model the relationships between climate and wood anatomical diversity patterns of extinct and extant plant communities in such a way that the impact of current and future climate change can be predicted reliably.

Introduction

Secondary xylem is a multifunctional, complex plant tissue that provides an ar- chive of the external signals that modified its functional attributes at different timescales, from the lifespan of a single tree to millions of years of biological evolution (Baas, 1986; Wheeler and Baas, 1991, 1993; Carlquist, 2001; Sperry, 2003; Baas et al., 2004; Poole and van den Bergen, 2006; Wheeler et al., 2007).

Type
Chapter
Information
Climate Change, Ecology and Systematics , pp. 141 - 155
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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