Thaindian News

Washington, July 20 (IANS) The world is a cooler, wetter place thanks to flowering plants. The effect is particularly pronounced in the Amazon basin, where replacing flowering plants with non-flowering varieties would result in an 80 percent decrease in the area covered by ever-wet rainforest, says a new study.
According to a report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, new climate simulations demonstrate the importance of flowering-plant physiology (functioning of living systems) to climate regulation in ever-wet rainforest, regions where the dry season is short or non-existent, and where biodiversity is greatest.

“The vein density of leaves within the flowering plants is much, much higher than all other plants,” said the study’s lead author, C. Kevin Boyce, Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

“That actually matters physiologically for both taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and also the loss of water, which is transpiration,” said Boyce, according to a University of Chicago release.

(Transpiration is a process similar to evaporation. It is the loss of water vapour from parts of plants [similar to sweating], especially in leaves).

“The two necessarily go together. You can’t take in CO2 without losing water,” said Boyce, according to a University of Chicago release.

This higher vein density in the leaves means that flowering plants are highly efficient at transpiring water from the soil back into the sky, where it can return to Earth as rain.

“That whole recycling process is dependent upon transpiration, and transpiration would have been much, much lower in the absence of flowering plants,” Boyce said.

For most of biological history there were no flowering plants — known scientifically as angiosperms.

They evolved about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and took another 20 million years to become prevalent.