Reconciling conflicting results regarding climate change effects on plants: A case study with wheat

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change will have considerable effects on plants. The extent to which these effects are positive or negative, however, has been controversial as some studies have found climate change to be positive on plants, while others find climate change effects to be detrimental to plants. In this thesis, a fully factorial experiment combining water and temperature over broad ranges (10-90% soil water content under 16°C-40°C), was carried out to address three shortcomings that might help explain the contrasting effects of climate change on plants: testing only one climate variable (e.g., only water or only temperature), failure to account for nonlinear responses to climatic variables, and studying a limited number of response variables. The experiment utilized wheat as the model species and yielded a diversity of outputs in dependent variables, which ranged from individual significant effects, significant interactions, and significant linear and non-linear responses to water and temperature. This study demonstrates that much of the contrasting results about plant responses to climatic variables could arise primarily from simplistic experiments that fail to capture the complex interaction between multiple plant traits and interactive climate conditions.