The CRC for Greenhouse Accounting has funded a collaborative project between Plant Industry at CSIRO Canberra and RSBS to expand on an existing experiment into interactions between elevated temperatures and elevated CO2 onPhalaris aquatica. We found that growth responses to treatments were seasonal, with warming increasing growth during winter, but decreasing growth during summer. Under eCO2 growth increased only during spring. Overall there was only a slight response of aboveground growth to eCO2 and none to warming. However, there were much larger effects belowground, with eCO2 increasing root growth by 35%, but no effect of warming. This is generally consistent with my results from York and supports the contention that CO2 effects are primarily belowground in grasslands. I also made ecosystem and soil respiration measurements over the course of a year, finding that warming had no effect on ecosystem or soil respiration. I am using an ANN model to look for environmental effects within this data.
© 1996-2007 Everard Edwards
This page was last updated Wed May 17 23:20:09 EST 2006.