How plants regulate their body temperatures:Implications for climate change science

The temperature at and near the Earth’s surface is rising, much to the consternation of the world.

Terrestrial life, including humans, is almost all restricted to a biofilm of few tens of meters above and below the surface. That life-supporting film, the biosphere, has, by comparison with the atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere, the greatest historical, seasonal and daily variation in environmental conditions, including temperature, moisture, solar radiation, atmospheric disturbances, electromagnetic fluxes, and chemical composition. Life forms have adapted to those wide swings in environmental conditions and notably to temperature.

It is well recognized that the diversity, abundance, and activities of terrestrial life are influenced by two main climatic factors, temperature and water availability. Warmth and water favor life. Environmental temperatures may be too cold or too hot to allow certain life forms to thrive. Environmental moisture has more complex direct and indirect effects on life. There are, additionally, other environmental factors (e.g. salinity, pH, the nature of substrates) that influence life. Global concern for climate change invokes the effects of the atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gases. Global climate change influences all those factors as life’s diversity, distribution, abundance, and activities are affected. The effects of global climate change on life are mostly inferred from general meteorology without much consideration for the actual environmental conditions close to the ground (micrometeorology) and within life forms (biometeorology). Micrometeorology and biometeorology must be applied to refining scientific understanding of the extent and consequences of climate change.

Numerous means for the mitigation of the effects of climate change are advocated and instituted. Strategies range in scale from macro to micro; from direct intervention on atmospheric chemistry (reducing the influx of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, cloud seeding), indirect environmental amelioration (irrigation, reafforestation, smoke smudging), to genetic manipulations (cold, heat, drought and pest tolerant crops and livestock). Plant thermoregulation and its consequences are hardly understood in terms of climate change.