Life Sciences Commons^™

Tropical Plant Physiological Responses To Experimental Warming And Hurricane Disturbance, Robert Tunison

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Tropical forests exchange more carbon with the atmosphere than any other biome, but their responses to climate change are largely understudied. The work presented in this dissertation uses a tropical understory warming experiment that was hit by a hurricane disturbance to investigate how plant physiology responds to multiple types of climate change pressures. We measured the potential for root respiration, leaf photosynthesis & respiration, and leaf thermotolerance acclimation to experimental warming while recovering from hurricane disturbance. We found there was thermal acclimation via decreased ecosystem root respiration, increased photosynthetic thermal niche breadth, and decreased quantum efficiency for some species at …