Reconfiguration as a Prerequisite for Survival in Highly Unstable Flow-Dominated Habitats
By Deane Harder, O. Speck, C. Hurd, Thomas Speck. Journal of Plant Growth Regulation, 2004
116 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Unstable and mechanically demanding habitats like wind-exposed open fields or the wave-swept intertidal require rapid adaptive processes to ensure survival. The mechanism of passive reconfiguration was analyzed in two plant models exposed to irregular flow of water or air, two species of the brown seaweed Durvillaea and the giant reed Arundo donax. Irrespective of the surrounding media and the subsequent Reynolds numbers (Re ~ 105 - 107), reconfiguration seems to be the key strategy for streamlining to avoid overcritical drag-induced loads. This passive mechanism is also discussed in the context of the requirement of a maximized surface area for light interception, so that morphological adaptations to rapid reconfiguration represent at least a bifactorial optimization. Both tested plant models exhibited the same principles in streamlining. At a specific threshold value, the proportionality between drag forces and flow velocity can be reduced from the second power close to an almost linear relation. This empirically derived relation could be characterized by a figure of merit or Vogel number (B). A value close to B = -1, resulting in a linear increase of drag force with velocity, was found at higher velocities for both the seaweeds and the giant reed, as well as for a variety of plants described in the literature. It is therefore concluded that the ability to reduce velocity-dependent drag force to a linear relation is a potentially important adaptation for plants to survive in unstable flow-dominated habitats.
Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Ecology, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c3de4b53985cf6645ccf0ce0d001a5ef8f25438
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In Earth-Surface Processes
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Citations in the corpus
- Effects of Wind on Plants (2008, background): “It is an essential mechanism by which vegetation reduces stress induced by external flow, in air or water (see Harder et al. 2004).”
- On the scaling of drag reduction by reconfiguration in plants (2012, methodology): “The values of Vogel exponents, in reviews such as [5,17], typically range from −0.”
- Drag reduction of flexible plates by reconfiguration (2010, methodology): “For example, the leaf of the tulip tree studied by Vogel (1989) rolls up in a cone with increasing wind speed, hence decreasing its cross-sectional area and making itself more streamlined.”