Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C 4 plants

Abstract

Plants with the C 4 photosynthetic pathway dominate today's tropical savannahs and grasslands, and account for some 30% of global terrestrial carbon fixation. Their success stems from a physiological CO 2 -concentrating pump, which leads to high photosynthetic efficiency in warm climates and low atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. Remarkably, their dominance of tropical environments was achieved in only the past 10 million years (Myr), less than 3% of the time that terrestrial plants have existed on Earth. We critically review the proposal that declining atmospheric CO 2 triggered this tropical revolution via its effects on the photosynthetic efficiency of leaves. Our synthesis of the latest geological evidence from South Asia and North America suggests that this emphasis is misplaced. Instead, we find important roles for regional climate change and fire in South Asia, but no obvious environmental trigger for C 4 success in North America. CO 2 -starvation is implicated in the origins of C 4 plants 25–32 Myr ago, raising the possibility that the pathway evolved under more extreme atmospheric conditions experienced 10 times earlier. However, our geochemical analyses provide no evidence of the C 4 mechanism at this time, although possible ancestral components of the C 4 pathway are identified in ancient plant lineages. We suggest that future research must redress the substantial imbalance between experimental investigations and analyses of the geological record.