Congratulations to Dr. Thaís Vasconcelos, Assistant Professor; Assistant Curator, U-M Herbarium, and Dr. Aly Baumgartner, Collections Manager, Vascular Plants, on the publication of their paper "Automated extraction of leaf mass per area from digitized herbarium specimens," in New Phytologist.

 

Introduction: Leaves are the organs responsible for the bulk of photosynthesis in most plant species, which provide them with the energy used in all metabolic functions and play a key role in transforming carbon from the air into carbon that can enter the energy ladder. Local temperature, water availability, and environmental stress can all impact the efficiency of photosynthesis; thus, specific leaf morphologies are expected to be favored through evolution under different climatic conditions (e.g. Peppe et al., 2011; Dong et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Baumgartner & Peppe, 2021). Climatic conditions are highly spatially variable and so consequently, are leaf forms. The almost endless variations in leaf morphologies and the tendency to find similar forms in similar habitats have not gone unnoticed by botanists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists of the past century (e.g. Bailey & Sinnott, 1915, 1916; Axelrod, 1966; Mooney & Dunn, 1970; Parkhurst & Loucks, 1972; Grime, 1977). As a result, there has been substantial interest in understanding how leaf traits correlate with their surrounding physical environment, especially in relation to climate, when analyzing large spatial scales.

Read the full paper here.