The mathematics of linked optimisation for water and nitrogen use in a canopy

By Thomas N. Buckley, J. Miller, G. Farquhar. 2002

85 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop, and discuss the implementation of, a mathematical framework for inferring optimal patterns of water and nitrogen use. Our analysis is limited to a time scale of one day and a spatial scale consisting of the green canopy of one plant, and we assume that this canopy has fi xed quantities of nitrogen and water available for use in photosynthesis. The effi ciencies of water and nitrogen use, and the interactions between the two, are strongly affected by physiological and physical properties that can be modeled in different ways. The thrust of this study is therefore to discuss these properties and how they affect the effi ciencies of nitrogen and water use, and to demonstrate, qualitatively, the effects of different model assumptions on inferred optimal strategies. Preliminary simulations suggest that the linked optimisation of nitrogen and water use is particularly sensitive to the level of detail in canopy light penetration models (e.g., whether sunlit and shaded fractions are pooled or considered independently), and to assumptions regarding nitrogen and irradiance gradients within leaves (which determine how whole-leaf potential electron transport rate is calculated from leaf nitrogen content and incident irradiance).

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/007e5a1928940c6e2504da61df35a9bdeac32f8a

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

Optimal stomatal control in relation to leaf area and nitrogen content (2002, unknown): “In fact, Buckley et al. (2002) show that it is not possible to identify optimal values for leaf nitrogen content for leaves within a canopy unless the response of stomatal conductance to a hypothetical perturbation in N is known.”
Optimisation of photosynthetic carbon gain and within-canopy gradients of associated foliar traits for Amazon forest trees (2010, background): “For example, it does not take into account effects of direct versus diffuse radiation (Buckley et al., 2002) and considers the forest canopy to consist only of one generic phenotype.”
Biological constraints on water transport in the soil–plant–atmosphere system (2013, background): “Approaches based on the postulate that stomata regulate water losses to maximize photosynthesis for a given amount of available soil water represent a viable alternative, thereby eliminating the need to describe the details of the mechanical movement or the signaling mechanism generating the movemen”