Treelines, climate and temperature regulation in plants – a wider context for Körner's views on the importance of plant architecture

Abstract

How do we explain the way that climate affects plant distribution, such as arctic or alpine treelines? Faced with predictions of significant human-caused climate changes such questions are of huge applied, as well as academic, interest. Recently in this journal Christian Körner (2008) provocatively argued that data on winter crop growth may provide important insights into the factors that govern treelines – a surprising, and perhaps inspired choice of data for thinking about trees. Here I consider Körner's views in the wider context of temperature regulation in plants and their geological history.

Keywords:

• air temperature
• climate
• convective heat loss
• leaves
• treeline

Acknowledgements

I thank James Lovelock for many discussions on temperature regulation in plants over the last few years (and the data on leaf temperatures in SW England included in Wilkinson [2006]), and Laszlo Nagy for inviting me to contribute this commentary paper to Plant Ecology & Diversity. Graeme Ruxton and Christian Körner made many helpful suggestions on reading earlier versions of the manuscript.