Haoping Zhang, Qiurui Ning, Qiang Li, Yi Jin, Yu Cao, Emily Patience Bakpa, Han Zhao, Jia Song, Pengcheng Ye, Yin Wen, Lingjie Song, Hui Liu
This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here.
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said in July 2023. The record-breaking and long-lasting 2022 heat waves led to extensive leaf damage of urban plants in China. Different plants experienced varying degrees of damage, from 0% to over 80% scorched leaf area ratio (Photo below), reflecting differences in their heat tolerance. However, whether different leaf structural traits of evergreen and deciduous plants contribute to their different responses under heat waves is still unclear. To address this question, we surveyed the in situ responses of urban woody species in four cities along the Yangtze River, which suffered the worst heat stress and experienced 23 to 49 days of heat waves (daily maximum temperature exceeded 35℃) from June to August 2022. We investigated the relationships between leaf damage ratios, four indices of leaf heat tolerance and eleven leaf structural traits of 36 species. We found that evergreen species suffered significantly less leaf damage ratios during the heat waves and exhibited higher leaf heat tolerance., Evergreens have thicker leaves than deciduous species, and high leaf mass per area and leaf thickness could indicate species with high leaf heat tolerance, but leaf area and stomatal traits are unexpectedly not related to heat tolerance. Our results explained the contrasting heat tolerance between leaf habits and provided some simple leaf traits to predict the vulnerability of species and select more heat tolerant plants for future heat stress.
Functional Ecology: Plain Language Summaries 