Asking the pikas politely…
Plants are known to regulate their leaf temperature, undergoing limited homeothermy. This may advantageous as it allows plants to utilize important photosynthetic and respiratory enzymes. We studied which traits affect a plant’s ability to regulate their temperature across highly variable air temperatures, helping build better models to predict which species will have a higher performance across different environmental gradients with a changing climate. Using a thermal camera, we took diurnal videos for seven separate sites over a 1,401 meter elevation gradient. After the diurnal measurements, we took trait measurements that include: leaf area, leaf height, stomatal conductance, and wet and dry mass. Using MATLAB, we cross-referenced thermal images with visible images to find individual leaves in a given plot. We determined which traits were responsible for the greatest deviation in the leaf’s temperature from ambient air temperature. The traits responsible for how quickly a plant can regulate its temperature can be found by finding the derivatives of air temperature versus time and the leaf temperature versus time functions and comparing them.
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