Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Section 1 Introduction
- Section 2 Adaptation, speciation and extinction
- 4 Global climate and extinction: evidence from the fossil record
- 5 Long-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 concentration influence plant speciation rates
- 6 Wood anatomy and climate change
- 7 Savanna biome evolution, climate change and the ecological expansion of C4 grasses
- 8 Climate warming results in phenotypic and evolutionary changes in spring events: a mini-review
- 9 Terrestrial green algae: systematics, biogeography and expected responses to climate change
- Section 3 Biogeography, migration and ecological niche modelling
- Section 4 Conservation
- Index
- Systematics Association Publications
- Plate section
- References
6 - Wood anatomy and climate change
from Section 2 - Adaptation, speciation and extinction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Section 1 Introduction
- Section 2 Adaptation, speciation and extinction
- 4 Global climate and extinction: evidence from the fossil record
- 5 Long-term fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 concentration influence plant speciation rates
- 6 Wood anatomy and climate change
- 7 Savanna biome evolution, climate change and the ecological expansion of C4 grasses
- 8 Climate warming results in phenotypic and evolutionary changes in spring events: a mini-review
- 9 Terrestrial green algae: systematics, biogeography and expected responses to climate change
- Section 3 Biogeography, migration and ecological niche modelling
- Section 4 Conservation
- Index
- Systematics Association Publications
- Plate section
- References
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 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
References
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