Abstract
Budburst is a key adaptive trait that can help us understand how plants respond to a changing climate from the molecular to landscape scale. Despite this, acquisition of budburst data is constrained by a lack of information at the plant scale on the environmental stimuli associated with the release of bud dormancy. Additionally, to date, little effort has been devoted to phenotyping plants in natural populations due to the challenge of accounting for the effect of environmental variation. Nonetheless, natural selection operates on natural populations, and investigation of adaptive phenotypes in situ is warranted and can validate results from controlled laboratory experiments. To identify genomic effects on individual plant phenotypes in nature, environmental drivers must be concurrently measured, and characterized. Here, we designed and evaluated a sensor to meet these requirements for temperate woody plants. It was designed for use on a tree branch to measure the timing of budburst together with its key environmental drivers; temperature, and photoperiod. Specifically, we evaluated the sensor through independent corroboration with time-lapse photography and a suite of environmental sampling instruments. We also tested whether the presence of the device on a branch influenced the timing of budburst. Our results indicated the following: the temperatures measured by the budburst sensor’s digital thermometer closely approximated the temperatures measured using a thermocouple touching plant tissue; the photoperiod detector measured ambient light with the same accuracy as did time lapse photography; the budburst sensor accurately detected the timing of budburst; and the sensor itself did not influence the budburst timing of Populus clones. Among other potential applications, future use of the sensor may provide plant phenotyping at the landscape level for integration with landscape genomics.
Highlights
Budburst is when plants initiate tissue growth from their buds, signaling the end of ecodormancy, and the beginning of the growing season (Lang et al, 1987)
In the spring when downwelling shortwave radiation was below 150 W m−2, digital thermometer values fell between air temperatures measured with the thermohygrometer and thermal infrared (TIR) foliar temperatures; during higher irradiance conditions, the digital thermometers measured values higher than the air and TIR foliar temperatures (Figure 4)
During the winter data collection period, the chilling units estimated between the measured air temperatures, digital thermometer, and thermocouple were within 31 units of each other, but the differences in accrued forcing units were much larger
Summary
Budburst is when plants initiate tissue growth from their buds, signaling the end of ecodormancy, and the beginning of the growing season (Lang et al, 1987). The timing of budburst in plants influences biomass accumulation and carbon sequestration, and informs us about the responses of genes and ecosystems to a changing climate (Menzel et al, 2006; Aitken et al, 2008). Climate change may alter the timing of budburst with potentially serious implications (Chuine, 2010), since it could change the amounts of chilling and forcing units sensed by vegetative buds, causing budburst to occur early, late, or not at all (Pope et al, 2013). Phenological shifts in agricultural crops can alter the beginning and length of growing seasons, and can cause crop failures (Chmielewski et al, 2004). A deeper understanding of plant response to climate change is imperative for addressing the effects of future climate change on agriculture and forest management (Badeck et al, 2004)
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