Person:
Green, Walton

Profile Picture

Email Address

AA Acceptance Date

Birth Date

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Job Title

Last Name

Green

First Name

Walton

Name

Green, Walton
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.70fe3aac-0445-4c99-a9ef-fecf31325664

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    Reading the leaves: A comparison of leaf rank and automated areole measurement for quantifying aspects of leaf venation1
    (Botanical Society of America, 2014) Green, Walton; Little, Stefan A.; Price, Charles A.; Wing, Scott L.; Smith, Selena Y.; Kotrc, Benjamin; Doria, Gabriela
    The reticulate venation that is characteristic of a dicot leaf has excited interest from systematists for more than a century, and from physiological and developmental botanists for decades. The tools of digital image acquisition and computer image analysis, however, are only now approaching the sophistication needed to quantify aspects of the venation network found in real leaves quickly, easily, accurately, and reliably enough to produce biologically meaningful data. In this paper, we examine 120 leaves distributed across vascular plants (representing 118 genera and 80 families) using two approaches: a semiquantitative scoring system called “leaf ranking,” devised by the late Leo Hickey, and an automated image-analysis protocol. In the process of comparing these approaches, we review some methodological issues that arise in trying to quantify a vein network, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of automatic data collection and human pattern recognition. We conclude that subjective leaf rank provides a relatively consistent, semiquantitative measure of areole size among other variables; that modal areole size is generally consistent across large sections of a leaf lamina; and that both approaches—semiquantitative, subjective scoring; and fully quantitative, automated measurement—have appropriate places in the study of leaf venation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Publication
    TRY – A Global Database of Plant Traits
    (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011) Kattge, J.; Díaz, S.; Lavorel, S.; Prentice, I. C.; Leadley, P.; Bönisch, G.; Garnier, E.; Westoby, M.; Reich, P. B.; Wright, I. J.; Cornelissen, J. H. C.; Violle, C.; Harrison, S. P.; Van Bodegom, P. M.; Reichstein, M.; Enquist, B. J.; Soudzilovskaia, N. A.; Ackerly, D. D.; Anand, M.; Atkin, O.; Bahn, M.; Baker, T. R.; Baldocchi, D.; Bekker, R.; Blanco, C. C.; Blonder, B.; Bond, W. J.; Bradstock, R.; Bunker, D. E.; Casanoves, F.; Cavender-Bares, J.; Chambers, J. Q.; Chapin, F. S.; Chave, J.; Coomes, D.; Cornwell, W. K.; Craine, J. M.; Dobrin, B. H.; Duarte, L.; Durka, W.; Elser, J.; Esser, G.; Estiarte, M.; Fagan, W. F.; Fang, J.; Fernández-Méndez, F.; Fidelis, A.; Finegan, B.; Flores, O.; Ford, H.; Frank, D.; Freschet, G. T.; Fyllas, N. M.; Gallagher, R. V.; Green, Walton; Gutierrez, A. G.; Hickler, T.; Higgins, S. I.; Hodgson, J. G.; Jalili, A.; Jansen, S.; Joly, C. A.; Kerkhoff, A. J.; Kirkup, D.; Kitajima, K.; Kleyer, M.; Klotz, S.; Knops, J. M. H.; Kramer, K.; Kühn, I.; Kurokawa, H.; Laughlin, D.; Lee, T. D.; Leishman, M.; Lens, F.; Lenz, T.; Lewis, S. L.; Lloyd, J.; Llusià, J.; Louault, F.; Ma, S.; Mahecha, M. D.; Manning, P.; Massad, T.; Medlyn, B. E.; Messier, J.; Moles, A. T.; Müller, S. C.; Nadrowski, K.; Naeem, S.; Niinemets, Ü.; Nöllert, S.; Nüske, A.; Ogaya, R.; Oleksyn, J.; Onipchenko, V. G.; Onoda, Y.; Ordoñez, J.; Overbeck, G.; Ozinga, W. A.; Patiño, S.; Paula, S.; Pausas, J. G.; Peñuelas, J.; Phillips, O. L.; Pillar, V.; Poorter, H.; Poorter, L.; Poschlod, P.; Prinzing, A.; Proulx, R.; Rammig, A.; Reinsch, S.; Reu, B.; Sack, L.; Salgado-Negret, B.; Sardans, J.; Shiodera, S.; Shipley, B.; Siefert, A.; Sosinski, E.; Soussana, J.-F.; Swaine, E.; Swenson, N.; Thompson, K.; Thornton, P.; Waldram, M.; Weiher, E.; White, M.; White, S.; Wright, S. J.; Yguel, B.; Zaehle, S.; Zanne, A. E.; Wirth, C.
    Plant traits – the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants and their organs – determine how primary producers respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, influence ecosystem processes and services and provide a link from species richness to ecosystem functional diversity. Trait data thus represent the raw material for a wide range of research from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology to biogeography. Here we present the global database initiative named TRY, which has united a wide range of the plant trait research community worldwide and gained an unprecedented buy-in of trait data: so far 93 trait databases have been contributed. The data repository currently contains almost three million trait entries for 69 000 out of the world's 300 000 plant species, with a focus on 52 groups of traits characterizing the vegetative and regeneration stages of the plant life cycle, including growth, dispersal, establishment and persistence. A first data analysis shows that most plant traits are approximately log-normally distributed, with widely differing ranges of variation across traits. Most trait variation is between species (interspecific), but significant intraspecific variation is also documented, up to 40% of the overall variation. Plant functional types (PFTs), as commonly used in vegetation models, capture a substantial fraction of the observed variation – but for several traits most variation occurs within PFTs, up to 75% of the overall variation. In the context of vegetation models these traits would better be represented by state variables rather than fixed parameter values. The improved availability of plant trait data in the unified global database is expected to support a paradigm shift from species to trait-based ecology, offer new opportunities for synthetic plant trait research and enable a more realistic and empirically grounded representation of terrestrial vegetation in Earth system models.