Our paper on bryophytes is out!

Last year, I spent a lot of time learning about the functioning of mosses and liverworts. I am a plant physiologist, but I must confess I had largely overlooked these little green guys under some of my colleagues draw my attention to it. After a fascinating visit to the group of Physiological Ecology, from the Department of Plant Sciences of the University of Cambridge, I was convinced these little guys could serve as the perfect model to understand some fundamental processes underlying carbon and sulphur uptake on plants.

Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornworts) lack active mechanisms to control for desiccation, including the pores that open and close to allow CO2 to access the sites in the plant cells where it is absorbed. This means that in these plants gas-exchange is only limited by diffusion. In the past decade, plant physiologists have enthusiastically embraced the potential of carbonyl sulfide(COS) as a tracer to estimate carbon uptke (that is Gross Primary Productivity or GPP) at the global scale. This is because the main sink for COS is the vegetation and COS uptake should be proportional to the rate of carbon removal from the atmosphere by terrestrial palnts. But this is provided that the flux of COS into the vegetation is one-way! Which did not turned out to be always the case as shown for example here or here. In our paper, we used two bryophytes as model plants to challenge some of the assumptions for estimating GPP from COS exchange. For the first time, we provide an in vivo estimate of the temperature sensitivity of COS emission, yes, yes emissions!