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Plants in a changing environment research
Plants don’t make a lot of noise; we often take them for granted. But plants fulfill a myriad of tasks, from influencing our climate to stabilising our soils. Human action has fundamentally changed the conditions under which plants grow. At AUT, we research various aspects of plant responses to their changing environment, from the leaf to the global level.
Current research includes studying the water relations of a living stump. Findings show that many tree species form root connections, which may give them advantages during droughts. Research on root grafting is in its infancy, and many questions remain to be investigated.
Related articles
- Hydraulic Coupling of a Leafless Kauri TreeRemnant to Conspecific Hosts (iScience)
- This vampire stump’s lust for life hints at an arboreal superorganism (Popular Science)
- Tree stumps are dead, right? This one was alive (New York Times)
- Remarkable new Kauri study (Scoop)
- Leafless Kauri tree stump (The Conversation)
- Plant growth: the What, the How, and the Why (New Phytologist)
- A meta-analysis of 1,119 manipulative experiments on terrestrial carbon-cycling responses to global change - (Nature)
- Modelling carbon sources and sinks in terrestrial vegetation (New Phytologist)
Dead or alive? The ‘zombie tree’, a kauri stump in the Waitakeres, kept alive by surrounding individuals who can still photosynthesise.
Students, with the help of locals, assess litter fall at the slopes of the Kolombangara volcano in the Solomon Islands.
Measuring sap flow in a living tree stump. The signals are tiny but can be amplified using statistical methods.