GfÖ Session 2014
Current topics in ecosystem science: Acclimation and adaptation of plant traits in
changing climate
Short title: Plant acclimation and adaptations
Tamir Klein, Yann Vitasse, Günter Hoch
Institute of Botany, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Schönbeinstrasse 6, 4056 Basel, Tel. 061-2673506
Plants are able to adjust their physiology to face changing climatic conditions at a given site.
These adjustments might be fast and reversible via acclimatization processes or slow and
durable via genetic adaptations. The extent to which specific plant traits are phenotypically
plastic or genotypically fixed is thus key to predict how fast plants and ecosystems can react
to ongoing and future climate change. In species with long generation times, and considering
the current rate of environmental change, acclimation and plasticity can make the difference
between life and death of entire plant populations. Similarly with climate change over time,
plants show also adjustments (variations) of functional traits along natural climatic gradients.
These variations result from genetic differentiation among populations (adaptation),
phenotypic response to the environmental changes (acclimation) and the interaction of both.
Over the last decades an increasing number of studies addressed the ability of plants to
acclimatize and adapt to environmental changes with different approaches, including the
investigation of natural climatic gradients, transplant experiments or common garden trials.
Within this session we welcome contributions from studies that aim to disentangle phenotypic
acclimation from genotypic adaptation in functional plant traits that are responsive to climatic
changes. We especially encourage presentations of studies combining measurements of the
variation of plant functional traits with genotyping.
Potential speakers:
Antoine Kremer, INRA Bordeaux
Tim Paape, University of Zürich
Emily Moran, ETH Zürich
Salix herbacea - Sinergia group (especially PhD's: Julia Wheeler, Janosch Seldaceck, Andres
Cortes)
Felix Guggerli, WSL
Jürgen Kreyling's group, University of Bayreuth
Oliver Bossdorf, University of Tübingen
Armando Lenz, University of Basel