Investigating flexure wood, a new paper finds that the cells in a tree react to strain from wind differently depending on whether they are being stretched or compressed.
Given the current pace of anthropogenic change, understanding plants’ evolutionary response to shifting abiotic conditions is vitally important. Schwallier et al. analyse the relationships between anatomical wood...
Plant functional traits constitute responses to a complex evolutionary reciprocality between plants and the environment. Wood anatomy varies between shrubs and trees, and between wet and dry habitats, but a question...
Flowering plants with simple vessel perforations have evolved from species bearing scalariform perforations but there is a scarcity of integrative studies explaining why these transitions in wood evolution have happened...
Woody vines collectively known as lianas are fundamental components of tropical forests but their root structure is largely unexplored. Stems of Sapindaceae display diverse architectures and an anatomical pattern...
We often use sap flux, or water transported by the xylem to estimate whole-tree water use, an important component of understanding ecosystem water use. However, not all sapwood is functionally equal and axial sap flux...
Disentangling tree growth requires more than ring width only. Although X-ray densitometry is an established technique to determine key wood density parameters, tedious manual procedures hamper fast analyses. De Mil et...
The functional relationship between cell types and three xylem functions of conduction, support and storage using approximately 800 tree species from China.
The family Balsaminaceae, which contains the species-rich genus Impatiens and the single-species genus Hydrocera (H. triflora), is essentially herbaceous and is nested into a largely woody clade of Ericales. Lens et al...