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>Scientists also don't understand what it is about higher CO2 that causes plants to become less nutritious, Ziska says, though they have some theories. Dude. L

by dqv 8y ago

>Scientists also don't understand what it is about higher CO2 that causes plants to become less nutritious, Ziska says, though they have some theories. Dude. Look at the soil, not the plant. Maybe the beneficial bacteria/worms/organisms are having trouble with increased carbon dioxide. I mean, if plants like more carbon dioxide, maybe it's the things under the plants that don't? edit: I emailed Ziska just in case

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alacombe 8y ago
or this is just another "correlation without causation" between nutrients in plants and CO2 level. However, you might be onto something, as questioning our current agro-industry heavily relying on pesticides rather than focusing on building an ecosystem. No till direct seeding under cover is particularly interesting alternative.
saalweachter 8y ago
My assumption would be that the root systems don't take up the extra minerals and nutrients any faster, but the plant grows faster, leading to the ratios being off. So if you took the two plants, grown in low-CO2 and high-CO2 conditions, and reduced them to constituent atoms, you might find that the two plants have the exact same amount of iron by mass, but the high-CO2 plant masses more overall, leading to less iron per gram of edible plant material. Or you end up with more iron concentrated in the leaves or stalks, and less in the grain, or ... Living organisms are complex balancing equations of thousands of chemical reactions running simultaneously, with the rates at which they run interacting as one reaction produces or consumes the input to another. Increasing the availability of CO2 causes some reactions to run faster, but what happens after that is really, really complex. If a reaction that was bound by the availability of CO2 previously becomes unbound, some processes will run faster, but if process A and process B compete for a common input X, and process A is running faster because of increased CO2 availability, process B may now run slower because X is being depleted faster than usual. Some problems like this may be solvable, but it's terribly complex and some of the solutions will have more side effects and some solutions will be really tricky to figure out. 60, 70% of agriculture is about maintaining a consistent environment for your plants to grow in, with the same amount of sunlight, the same amount of water, and the same concentration of soil nutrients as you have found in years past to produce the best results. The prospect of having to rediscover what the new optimal values for all of the parameters you currently juggle, whether you are growing tomatoes, grapes or corn, is ... interesting.
- athenot 8y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, that's how some herbicides work: by making certain parts of the plant grow faster than what the roots can deliver, thus killing the plant.
civilitty 8y ago
This will be a really hard relationship to properly measure because the answer is both to varying degrees - depending on the species. Plants absorb tons of nutrients from symbiotic colonies but they also regulate how much and how fast they absorb those nutrients using a variety of chemical and physical means. Figuring out those relationships is an intractable problem with current technology (which isn't even capable of isolating or identifying most bacteria) This is really easy to demonstrate on the plant side with cannabis: start out with some clones in your choice of grow medium and grow them until you can seal a nonpermeable material over the top of the plant (around the stem but above the medium so that the flowers/lighting is separated from it). Then, control the CO2 in the cavity so that the leaves and most of the stem is in high-CO2 conditions and the medium in atmo. Compared with plants that grew entirely in high CO2 and entirely in regular conditions using the same lighting/nutrition/medium. Once you've got a large enough sample size to weed out the noise, the effects are rather pronounced: high CO2 significantly increases the size of the buds, which increases the absolute amount of THC in the plant relative to its root network size, apparently depriving several other metabolic pathways of nutrients. The concentration of terpenes and other cannabinoids will be significantly lower in the high CO2 plants regardless of whether only the flowers were in high CO2 or everything was (at least, that was the result with a common Sour Diesel strain on a 200 plant sample size). That's a lot of factors to control for but there is a lot of underground research into this very topic because the quality of cannabis can vary dramatically based on small changes in growing conditions. Figuring out the various relationships between timing/CO2/temperature/lighting/nutrients and the active ingredients in the final product is worth a ton of money so I'm hoping that industry will make some headway into this research field.

by dqv 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

alacombe 8y ago

or this is just another "correlation without causation" between nutrients in plants and CO2 level. However, you might be onto something, as questioning our current agro-industry heavily relying on pesticides rather than focusing on building an ecosystem. No till direct seeding under cover is particularly interesting alternative.

saalweachter 8y ago

My assumption would be that the root systems don't take up the extra minerals and nutrients any faster, but the plant grows faster, leading to the ratios being off. So if you took the two plants, grown in low-CO2 and high-CO2 conditions, and reduced them to constituent atoms, you might find that the two plants have the exact same amount of iron by mass, but the high-CO2 plant masses more overall, leading to less iron per gram of edible plant material. Or you end up with more iron concentrated in the leaves or stalks, and less in the grain, or ... Living organisms are complex balancing equations of thousands of chemical reactions running simultaneously, with the rates at which they run interacting as one reaction produces or consumes the input to another. Increasing the availability of CO2 causes some reactions to run faster, but what happens after that is really, really complex. If a reaction that was bound by the availability of CO2 previously becomes unbound, some processes will run faster, but if process A and process B compete for a common input X, and process A is running faster because of increased CO2 availability, process B may now run slower because X is being depleted faster than usual. Some problems like this may be solvable, but it's terribly complex and some of the solutions will have more side effects and some solutions will be really tricky to figure out. 60, 70% of agriculture is about maintaining a consistent environment for your plants to grow in, with the same amount of sunlight, the same amount of water, and the same concentration of soil nutrients as you have found in years past to produce the best results. The prospect of having to rediscover what the new optimal values for all of the parameters you currently juggle, whether you are growing tomatoes, grapes or corn, is ... interesting.

athenot 8y ago
If I'm not mistaken, that's how some herbicides work: by making certain parts of the plant grow faster than what the roots can deliver, thus killing the plant.

civilitty 8y ago

This will be a really hard relationship to properly measure because the answer is both to varying degrees - depending on the species. Plants absorb tons of nutrients from symbiotic colonies but they also regulate how much and how fast they absorb those nutrients using a variety of chemical and physical means. Figuring out those relationships is an intractable problem with current technology (which isn't even capable of isolating or identifying most bacteria) This is really easy to demonstrate on the plant side with cannabis: start out with some clones in your choice of grow medium and grow them until you can seal a nonpermeable material over the top of the plant (around the stem but above the medium so that the flowers/lighting is separated from it). Then, control the CO2 in the cavity so that the leaves and most of the stem is in high-CO2 conditions and the medium in atmo. Compared with plants that grew entirely in high CO2 and entirely in regular conditions using the same lighting/nutrition/medium. Once you've got a large enough sample size to weed out the noise, the effects are rather pronounced: high CO2 significantly increases the size of the buds, which increases the absolute amount of THC in the plant relative to its root network size, apparently depriving several other metabolic pathways of nutrients. The concentration of terpenes and other cannabinoids will be significantly lower in the high CO2 plants regardless of whether only the flowers were in high CO2 or everything was (at least, that was the result with a common Sour Diesel strain on a 200 plant sample size). That's a lot of factors to control for but there is a lot of underground research into this very topic because the quality of cannabis can vary dramatically based on small changes in growing conditions. Figuring out the various relationships between timing/CO2/temperature/lighting/nutrients and the active ingredients in the final product is worth a ton of money so I'm hoping that industry will make some headway into this research field.