Recent research from Colorado State University shows that plants “hold their breath” in smoky conditions.
“You know, people, we all run inside and close our windows, and we have somewhere we can go. And plants don't. They don't have the ability to run, so either they have to just deal with the smoke or find some other approach,” said Delphine Farmer, a professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University. She is studying how chemical compounds that plants emit can interact with the atmosphere.
“We were trying to understand how it is that plants emit those compounds by making measurements in a pine forest up in the Rocky Mountains here in Colorado. And the problem with doing measurements in Colorado these days is that if you're making measurements in the late summer or early fall, there can be a lot of wildfire events,” Farmer said.
On days that wildfire smoke engulfed their study site, Farmer said, her students noticed something strange.
“The plants, they just shut down. They stopped doing any photosynthesis, so they stopped taking up any CO2, they stopped putting out any oxygen. They just did not want to interact with the atmosphere,” Farmer said.
Farmer said other plant biologists have anecdotally reported seeing similar responses to wildfire smoke, but the phenomenon is understudied.
“It could be a plant physiological response to extreme pollution. Another hypothesis is that those smoke volatiles, all the compounds that come with smoke, kind of glue those little pores inside the leaf shut,” Farmer said.
Farmer and her students were specifically looking at Ponderosa pines, a dominant tree species in the western United States. Now, Farmer said, she is curious about how different types of plants, including crops, respond to wildfire smoke.
“I think that it’s certainly becoming more important as our climate is changing and as we're having more wildfire events, …we still need a lot more research,” Farmer said.
