UQ School of Biological Sciences postdoctoral fellow Dr Elizabeth Law said it was a century-old conundrum for scientists as to why leaf size varied with latitude – from very small near the poles to massive leaves in the tropics.
"While the textbooks say it's a balance between water availability and overheating, we just didn't see that in the data," she said.
The research, led by Associate Professor Ian Wright from Macquarie University, revealed that in much of the world, key factors affecting leaf size were night temperatures and risk of frost damage to leaves.
The international team of researchers analysed leaves from more than 7600 species across the world. The data was teamed with new theory to create a series of equations which predict the maximum viable leaf size anywhere in the world based on the risk of daytime overheating and night-time freezing.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-frost-leaf-size-worldwide.html#jCp
