Abstract
Coupling the carbon cycle to climate is a key tenet of modern biogeochemistry and the basis for predictions of future climate warming. Information about this coupling comes from linking modern-day biogeochemistry to past relationships between climatic changes and the C cycle. Understanding the role of plants in regulating the C cycle and changes in that regulation through geological history is of utmost interest. Above and belowground plant traits play a very large magnitude role in regulating terrestrial C cycling rates. In short, species that seek a fast return on carbon invested in leaves produce palatable leaves and labile litter and have particular types of mycorrhizas. These species both capture and release carbon fast. Other species seek to preserve and protect their carbon investment, and those traits slow the C cycle. Because data for these traits are not preserved in the fossil record, very little is known about the evolutionary history of traits that drive the C cycle. Given the magnitude of the effect of plant traits in modern ecosystems, this is a key knowledge gap. We will address this question for the first time by using phylogenetic methods with the molecular phylogeny for the higher plants. We will link this to a novel experimental setup for quantifying C cycling traits of modern plants representing evolutionary key clade divergences in a standardized way. By this method we can reconstruct the evolution of these C cycling related traits and assess their quantitative importance for the C cycle through evolutionary time.
Netherlands