Plants have an impressive variety of techniques for resisting drought, as highlighted by an international study published in early August, which looked at vegetation in arid zones.
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The heat is still raging in France. Even if we can breathe a little easier in some regions, on Tuesday, August 13 in the morning, nine departments are still on orange heatwave alert. And to cope with this heat, plants are showing imagination. You only have to look at what is happening in arid areas to realize to what extent vegetation can put in place very varied techniques to adapt.
The baobab, for example, loses its leaves during the dry season and stores large quantities of water in its trunk during the rainy season. The cactus survives in the desert thanks to its waxy skin that retains moisture and its thorns capture the slightest drop. Stone plants, as their nickname indicates, look like small stones, and it is a way of protecting themselves from herbivores that graze in these arid areas. This variety of techniques to resist drought or predators is what we call functional diversity.
The drier the climate, the richer this functional diversity, an international team of scientists has just discovered in an eight-year study. It was led in particular by National Institute for Agricultural, Food and Environmental Research (INRAE), the results were published on August 7 in the journal Nature. The researchers speak of a real surprise, because they thought that with aridity a phenomenon of plant selection developed with an impoverishment of varieties. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Their functional diversity would even be twice as important in arid zones than in temperate zones.
If we find such diversity in regions like the Mediterranean scrubland, the Patagonian steppes or the Mongolian desert, is that there is less vegetation, less biodiversity and therefore less competition between plants. They can therefore diversify more easily. They will have much more heterogeneous shapes, physiognomies or chemical compounds. For researchers, these are important results since arid zones are much less studied than temperate regions. However, with global warming, they risk gaining ground. This therefore makes it possible to anticipate the upheaval of landscapes.
