2 ms·

Study means little as it takes a specific forest in Canada. We should probably look at Amazonian forests, California's redwoods, India's Vindhyas and Namibia's

• matt4077 8y ago
  The basics of photosynthesis are more or less identical across green plants. All the cool evolutionary shit has been going on in preserving water and capturing light, pointing at CO2 probably not being a limiting factor. Even the one neat CO2 trick I remember was really a hack to preserve water: some desert plants have a mechanism to store a day’s worth of CO2, allowing them to close pores and prevent evaporation. Anyway, if you’re looking for a counterexample, I’d switch environments altogether and try again in bacteria, algae, and maybe grasses. While I doubt there would be much of a difference to trees, the first two are at least a few degrees further away from them in the deity’s org chart. All three categories also strike me as possibly being more relevant than trees in terms of total biomass, although that’s just a hunch that may be completely wrong.
  • averros 8y ago
    Different groups of green plants have significantly different photosynthetic cycles (notably C3, C4, and CAM) which respond very differently to changes in CO2 concentration. For C4 plants (about 3% of plants) the current CO2 concentration is at the point of saturation. C3 plants (85% of plant species, including most trees and grasses, and staple crops such as wheat) have rates of photosynthesis proportional to CO2 concentration to about 1000ppm or so. (The desert plants you mentioned use CAM cycle, but overall their contribution to CO2 consumption is small.)