Leaf growth under temperature and light control

Abstract

Dynamics of crop growth and photosynthesis are two main processes that are of major importance for adaptation of plants to their environment. Two experiments were carried out during 2005 and 2006 with sun and shaded barley plants. The results showed that leaf area increased with leaf position on the main stem up to leaf position 5 for sun and leaf position 6 for shaded plants, and then declined towards flag leaves. Air temperature affected leaf appearance, mainly at the beginning of the growing season. A positive correlation between leaf expansion duration (LED) and accumulated temperature sum was measured for both variants, LED linearly increased with temperature sum. Leaf expansion rate (LER) showed a similar dependence on accumulated air temperatures in both light variants. A strong relation was found between soil temperature and LER for the first four leaves of the main stem of shaded plants in 2006. In shaded environment the higher LER was associated with lower accumulated irradiance sum when light restriction supported an increase of leaf elongation and final leaf length.