Just a quick post today, my last one for March. Like probably most of you, I’ve been trying to pretend to be as normal as possible despite the COVID-19 surrealism all around me. But even COVID-19 has shifted my research to a small degree.
But I’m not going to talk about the global pandemic right now (I can almost hear the collective sigh of relief). Instead, I’m going to go back to topic and discuss a paper that I’ve just co-authored.
Last year I went to China’s Yunnan Province where I met some fantastic colleagues at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden who were doing some very cool stuff with the variation in plant functional traits across environmental gradients.
Well, those colleagues invited me to participate in one those research projects, and I’m happy to say that the result has just been published in Forests.
Measuring the functional traits of different alpine trees species in the Changbai Mountains of far north-eastern China (no, I didn’t get to go there), the research set out to test how these varied among species and elevation.
Of course, one expects that different trees use different combinations of traits to survive the rigours of mountain life (high variation in temperature, freezing, wind, etc.), but generally speaking, you might expect things like xylem vessel diameter and density to change more or less monotonically (i.e., changing in a consistent manner as elevation rises or falls). This is because trees should adapt their traits to the local conditions as best they can. Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 