Liu et al. conducted a meta-analysis to test the hypothesis that shade-induced increases in specific-leaf-area (SLA) indicate an adaptive plant response to optimizing light capture.
They conclude that species with greater SLA phenotypic plasticity were less able to maintain biomass under shade. Some of the plastic changes that are frequently thought to be adaptive may simply reflect passive responses to the environment, or occur as by-products of adaptive plastic responses in other traits.
In some woody plants, adjusting leaf size (via epidermal cell size) balances water supply (veins) with transpirational demand (stomata). However, it is unclear whether this is a general pattern among plant species...
Both phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation may allow widely distributed plant species to either acclimate or adapt to environmental heterogeneity. Given the typically low genetic variation of clonal plants across...
Heteroblasty, crowding and shade avoidance Acacia implexa shows leaf heteroblasty, developing compound, transitional and modified leaves (phyllodes), and previous experiments have shown that shade can alter the ontogeny...
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