The Grand Challenges in Functional Plant Ecology
By C. Körner. 2011
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The science, this section-journal of Frontiers in Plant Sciences will be covering at great breadth and depth, aims at linking plant responses with the environment. The environmental influences are manifold and include both abiotic and biotic ones. The first include physical and chemical influences, the latter include plant–plant, plant–animal, plant–microbe (incl. virus) interactions. The plant responses considered go from gene to ecosystem scale. Building upon more than a century of functional plant ecology, any attempt at sketching the challenges ahead is inevitably rather subjective, reflecting personal experience, and expertise. Plant ecology covers both, basic science and oriented (applied) science, the latter under strong influence of the ongoing attempts at understanding impacts of environmental changes, particularly those, commonly subsumed under “global change.” The current wave of global change research often tends to lack sound foundation in theory, because functional plant ecology is a relatively young science and the applied questions came up before many of the more basic queries had been answered. On the other hand, the great motivation associated with global change research, will exert a new momentum in exploring the underlying principles of plant responses to the environment. In three sections, I will try to reflect on how this field of science developed, and from there, will distil a few tasks that I would rank as grand challenges. Several references were chosen to emphasize that the insights are rather classics, but their appreciation has not become common sense.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Plant Science, Computational Biology & Bioinformatics
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
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Citations in the corpus
- Persistence and production of perennial grasses under water deficits and extreme temperatures: importance of intraspecific vs. interspecific variability (2012, background): “…the full expression of plants strategies to cope with stresses such a dehydration delays through water uptake from the lowest layers of the soil (Volaire et al., 2009), and (2) realistic comparisons between sites with respect to plant responses under a range of climatic treatments (Körner, 2011).”
- Global assessment of limitation to symbiotic nitrogen fixation by phosphorus availability in terrestrial ecosystems using a meta‐analysis approach (2013, background): “Our study thus confirms that improving our knowledge of soils and understanding the role of P in the global productivity are two of the main challenges that will face the scientific community in coming decades [Korner, 2011; McNeill and Winiwarter, 2004; Tilman et al., 2002].”