Academic literature on the topic 'Trait foliaire'

AbstractAbove- and belowground systems are linked via plant chemistry. In forested systems, leaf litter chemistry and quality mirror that of green foliage and have important afterlife effects. In systems where belowground inputs dominate, such as grasslands, or in ecosystems where aboveground biomass is frequently removed by burning or harvesting, foliar traits may provide important information regarding belowground inputs via exudates and fine-root turnover. Many, if not most, of the plant traits that drive variation in belowground processes are also measurable via remote sensing technologies. The ability of remote sensing techniques to measure fine-scale biodiversity and plant chemistry over large spatial scales can help researchers address ecological questions that were previously prohibitively expensive to address. Key to these potential advances is the idea that remotely sensed vegetation spectra and plant chemistry can provide detailed information about the function of belowground processes beyond what traditional field sampling can provide.

AbstractPotassium (K) fertilizer recommendations for annual crops in the USA are generally founded in soil test results. The goal of this chapter is to highlight additional plant-related traits that may impact crop responses to K fertilization. This includes the role of tissue testing, the influence of luxury consumption, genetic improvement of K use efficiency, genotype × environment × management interactions on K uptake and yield, response to foliar K fertilization, intraplant K cycling, fungal associations and K uptake, the influence of K on crop quality, and the role of K in abiotic stress tolerance. Recognizing the potential role of these plant factors may help reconcile response inconsistencies based solely on soil test information, and improve future K recommendations. Finally, we hope to highlight knowledge gaps and opportunities for additional integrated soil–plant K research.

When my wife Joan and I were newly married, we lived in a north Jersey suburb not far from the New York state line. Every weekday morning we drove down the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the George Washington Bridge and crossed the Hudson River to Manhattan, where I taught and Joan was a graduate student. The parkway runs along the Palisades, a magnificent, igneous bluff that flanks the west bank of the Hudson and faces, on the far shore, Yonkers, the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and Manhattan. Wooded parkland extends on both sides of the road for its entire length until just before the approach to the bridge, where many lanes of superhighway converge on the toll booths. We loved the woods along the parkway—they calmed us before our immersion in the chaotic city, and soothed us when we left it at the end of the day. That was before we went on our honeymoon, a three-week hike on the Appalachian Trail (interspersed with some hitchhiking on country roads), from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to the border of the Great Smokies in North Carolina. The forest we walked through was a mixture of tall pines and an incredible variety of native hardwoods—an experience of natural diversity that was overwhelming. Nearly every tree we saw was new to us, yet we could feel the pattern and cohesiveness of the forest as a whole. Rhododendrons formed a closed canopy over our heads, fragmenting the June sunshine into a softly shifting mosaic of dap-pled patches. We stepped on a carpet of rhododendron petals. The trip was over all too quickly. The plane carrying us back de-scended through a dense inversion layer of black smog before touching down on the runway at Newark. Home. We were depressed and silent. The ride from Newark Airport to our house took us on the Palisades Parkway. For the first time, we became aware that the woods along the park way were dominated by thin, ungainly Ailanthus, with their coarse(and, we knew, rank-smelling) foliage, and by other weedy species such as the lanky Paulownia. Suddenly, these exotic species seemed very much out of place.