Anita Roth-Nebelsick

• PD PhD
• Curator for fossil plants at State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart

The fog harvesting grass Stipagrostis sabulicola is one of the few plants able to cope with the hostile conditions in dune fields of the hyper-arid Namib Desert. S. sabulicola tussocks modify the substrate and atmospheric conditions leading to the formation of fog plant oases (FPO). Average air temperature within FPO canopies was reduced by up to 7...

The vessels of various woody plants show helical sculpturing of the internal side of the secondary wall. The occurrence of these structures, termed helical thickenings (HT), is correlated with environmental parameters. Their adaptive benefit is, however, still not well understood. Suggestions for functional effects include mechanical stabilization,...

The fog harvesting grass Stipagrostis sabulicola is one of the few plants able to cope with the hostile conditions in dune fields of the hyper arid Namib desert. S. sabulicola tussocks modify the substrate and atmospheric conditions leading to the formation of fog plant oases (FPO). Air temperature within FPO canopies was reduced by up to 7.5°C and...

The geological record encodes the relationship between climate and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) over long and short timescales, as well as potential drivers of evolutionary transitions. However, reconstructing CO 2 beyond direct measurements requires the use of paleoproxies and herein lies the challenge, as proxies differ in their assumptions...

Introduction Many atmospheric aerosols are hygroscopic and play an important role in cloud formation. Similarly, aerosols become sites of micro-condensation when they deposit to the upper and lower surfaces of leaves. Deposited salts, in particular can trigger condensation at humidities considerably below atmospheric saturation, according to their...

In this contribution, the diversity of functional leaf architecture and its association with climate is studied for extant woody dicot species of North America and Europe/South West Asia. The results are compared to fossil leaves of seventeen locations in Central Europe ranging from the Paleogene to Neogene. Four functional leaf traits, lobation, m...

The Arctic forests of the Eocene, which thrived under elevated CO2, a temperate climate, high precipitation and annually extremely different daylengths, represent a quite spectacular no‐analogue habitat of Earth's greenhouse past. The aim of this study was to improve our understanding of the ecophysiology of Arctic broad‐leaved deciduous forests of...

Xylem vulnerability to embolism can be quantified by “vulnerability curves” (VC) that are obtained by subjecting wood samples to increasingly negative water potential and monitoring the progressive loss of hydraulic conductivity. VC are typically sigmoidal, and various approaches are used to fit the experimentally obtained VC data for extracting be...

The history of the long‐distance transport systems of vascular plants, phloem, and xylem, is a long and winding road of scientific progress which fascinated and occupied foresters, botanists, and physicists during the last 250 years. Although the Münch pressure flow hypothesis of phloem transport is meanwhile generally accepted, some details are no...

Cuticles are extracellular membranes covering the primary aerial parts of vascular plants. They consist of a multifunctional polymeric material with embedded soluble components called waxes, and serve as the interface between plants and their atmospheric environment, first of all protecting them from desiccation. Remarkably, damaged wax layers may...

Objectives This study presents the Integrated Leaf Trait Analysis (ILTA), a workflow for the combined application of methodologies in leaf trait and insect herbivory analyses on fossil dicot leaf assemblages. The objectives were (1) to record the leaf morphological variability, (2) to describe the herbivory pattern on fossil leaves, (3) to explore...

As organs of photosynthesis, leaves are of vital importance for plants and a source of inspiration for biomimetic developments. Leaves are composed of interconnected functional elements that evolved in concert under high selective pressure, directed toward strategies for improving productivity with limited resources. In this paper, selected basic c...

The study of Neogene palaeoclimate supports our understanding of effects and consequences of current climate changes. However, many aspects and details of Miocene climate development are still unclear. Fossil leaves are a valuable and rich source of palaeoclimate proxy data. In this contribution, two Miocene leaf assemblages from eastern China, the...

Background and aims: Foliar water uptake (FWU) has been documented in many species and is increasingly recognized as a non-trivial factor in plant-water relations. However, it remains unknown whether FWU is a wide-spread phenomenon in Pinus species, and how it may relate to needle traits such as the form and structure of stomatal wax plugs. In thi...

There are currently efforts to improve strategies for biomimetic approaches, to identify pitfalls and to provide recommendations for a successful biomimetic work flow. In this contribution, a case study of a concrete biomimetic project is described that started with a posed technical problem for which seemingly obvious biological models exist. The...

The uptake of water through leaves is commonly referred to as foliar water uptake (FWU). The phenomenon has been documented in many species and is increasingly recognized as a non-trivial factor in plant-water relations. However, it remains unknown whether FWU is a wide-spread phenomenon in Pinus species, and how it may relate to needle traits such...

Bio-inspired design (BID) means the concept of transferring functional principles from biology to technology. The core idea driving BID-related work is that evolution has shaped functional attributes, which are termed “adaptations” in biology, to a high functional performance by relentless selective pressure. For current methods and tools, such as...

Raindrop impact on leaves is a common event which is of relevance for numerous processes, including the dispersal of pathogens and propagules, leaf wax erosion, gas exchange, leaf water absorption, and interception and storage of rainwater by canopies. The process of drop impact is complex, and its outcome depends on many influential factors. The w...

Many plant tissues exhibit the property of frost resistance. This is mainly due to two factors: one is related to metabolic effects, while the other stems from structural properties of plants leading to dehydration of their cells. The present contribution aims at assessing the impact of ice formation on frost-resistant plant tissues with a focus on...

The floating leaves of the aquatic fern Salvinia molesta are covered by super-hydrophobic hairs (=trichomes) which are shaped like egg-beaters. These trichomes cause high water repellency and stable unwettability if the leaf is immersed. Whereas S. molesta hairs are technically interesting, there remains also the question concerning their biologica...

Although being recognized as a major force behind speciation in flowering plants, the evolutionary relevance of genome duplication (polyploidization) remains largely unexplored in mosses. Phylogenetic and-genomic insights from the model organism Physcomitrella patens and closely related species revealed that polyploidization, likely via hybridizati...

It is assumed that special structures in aerial roots of leafless orchids, aeration units, are involved in gas exchange regulation. In this study, the structure of aeration units in three leafless taxa (Microcoelia exilis, M. aphylla, Dendrophylax funalis) and a leaf-bearing species (Campylocentrum micranthum) are investigated to obtain more eviden...

Trees are the fundamental element of forest ecosystems, made possible by their mechanical qualities and their highly sophisticated conductive tissues. The evolution of trees, and thereby the evolution of forests, were ecologically transformative and affected climate and biogeochemical cycles fundamentally. Trees also offer a substantial amount of e...

ABSTRACT Data of climate-sensitive leaf traits, which are usually collected and analyzed for entire fossil leaf assemblages, also include intraspecific responses to environmental conditions. Intraspecific correlations between climate and leaf traits represent plastic responses on the individual level as well as plasticity caused by genetic differen...

Recently two tools, Drudge 1 and 2, were introduced to more easily assess modern vegetation proxies for the fossil record. They are based on three similarities: the Integrated Plant Record (IPR) Similarity assessing the similarity between fossil assemblages and modern vegetation based on the proportion of major zonal angiosperm components; the Taxo...

Aerial roots of orchids are able to absorb atmospheric water (e.g. rain, mist, dew) and to conduct it to the root interior. The water is absorbed by imbibition into a biological porous material, the velamen radicum, which envelops the aerial root and comprises one or two to several layers. The velamen radicum consists of walls of dead cells and sho...

In the present study, the sites of extracellular ice formation within leaves and petioles of Stachys byzantina C. Koch were identied and anatomically studied by different imaging techniques. Naturally acclimated plant parts were analyzed during the winter season in various states (xed, native, before freezing, frozen and after thawing) by using d...

A variety of proxies have been developed to reconstruct paleo‐CO2 from fossil leaves. These proxies rely on some combination of stomatal morphology, leaf δ¹³C, and leaf gas exchange. A common conceptual framework for evaluating these proxies is lacking, which has hampered efforts for inter‐comparison. Here we develop such a framework, based on the...

There is general concern that the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to reduced stomatal conductance and subsequent increases in leaf temperature. Such an increase in leaf temperature is expected to adversely impact a plethora of processes connected to leaf metabolism and microbial/fungal communities on leaves. A model is pro...

Vulnerability of xylem to embolism is expressed by vulnerability curves (VC) depicting accumulating loss of hydraulic conductivity against mounting pressure stress. VCs are obtained experimentally by curve fitting, providing important benchmark data on vulnerability of a species, organ, or other specific xylem categories. Since embolism spread by a...

Palaeontology and biology are closely related sciences, as are the collections associated with them. Nevertheless there are differences between the two types of collections and the scientific data that they yield with regards to taxonomy, climate and ecology. In order to bridge the gap between the two subjects, it is important to clarify what these...

Leaves are the most appropriate plant organs for studying adaptations to environmental changes as they are the locations of photosynthetic metabolism and thus directly exposed to habitat conditions. Besides investigations on complete assemblages, individual long-ranging species could directly mirror adaptations and changes of leaf traits on environ...

Plants growing in areas with cold winters use numerous strategies to cope with low temperatures and alternating freezing and thawing events. In one of these strategies, the plants die off and survive the winter with underground storage organs or seeds. However, numerous species do not discard the parts aboveground. Rather, dense forests exist in ar...

Current studies on the evolution of selected moss species reveal exciting new insights into the genetic mechanisms that lead to the creation of new species. One of these moss species, the spreading earthmoss, has been used in science as a model organism for many years, and its genetic information has been completely decrypted. This makes it and oth...

In frost hardy plants, the lethal intracellular formation of ice crystals has to be prevented during frost periods. Besides the ability for supercooling and pre-frost dehydration of tissues, extracellular ice forma- tion is another strategy to control ice development in tissues. During extracellular ice formation, partially large ice bodies accumul...

Identifying fossil plants is a key task in palaeobotany. To provide support and easy access to gaining competence in identifying fossil angiosperm leaves, the web platform Digiphyll was developed. Digiphyll is intended to be suitable for teaching as well as for the general public. The ultimate objective is to promote the use of fossil plants in geo...

Leaves as main locations of photosynthesis show various adaptations of morphological and anatomical traits to habitat conditions. By implication, leaf traits of fossil dicotyledonous plants can be used as proxies for reconstructions of palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic conditions. Herein, a Paleogene leaf flora, the Profen-Süd LC assemblage fr...

Spores and propagules of bryophytes are known to build up underground (dia)spore banks and have a dormant capability to colonize bare soils after disturbance events. We investigated a spore bank at a fishpond near Stuttgart, Germany, by taking a drilling core to the laboratory and germinating mosses from subsamples of the core. Two species were pre...

Proxy estimates of atmospheric CO2 are necessary to reconstruct Earth's climate history. Confidence in paleo-CO2 estimates can be increased by comparing results from multiple proxies at a single site, but so far this strategy has been implemented only for marine-based techniques. Here we present CO2 estimates for the well-studied early Paleocene Ca...

Xylem and phloem are the two main conveyance systems in plants allowing exchanges of water and carbohydrates between roots and leaves. While each system has been studied in isolation for well over a century, the coupling and coordination between them remains the subject of inquiry and active research and frames the scope of the review here. Using a...

During land plant evolution many groups developed the ability to survive freezing events. Extracellular freezing is an essential process, it accompanies cell dehydration mechanism and protects the living tissue from internal damage which would be evoked by intracellular ice crystal growth. Within our project we studied freezing of various frost har...

Correlations of leaf traits with environmental conditions are widely used for reconstruction of palaeoclimate and to analyse the evolution of land plants. Evaluation of climate-dependent leaf traits of fossil floras can potentially contribute to our understanding of long-term responses of vegetation to changing climate. In this contribution, basic...

During land plant evolution many groups developed the ability to survive freezing events. Extracellular freezing is an essential process, because it initiates cell dehydration mechanism and protects the living tissue from internal damage which would be evoked by intracellular ice crystal growth. Within our project we studied freezing of various fro...

During land plant evolution many groups developed the ability to survive freezing events. Extracellular freezing is an essential process, because it initiates cell dehydration mechanism and protects the living tissue from internal damage which would be evoked by intracellular ice crystal growth. Within our project we studied freezing of various fro...

In this study, the ice nucleation activity (INA) and ice nucleation temperature (INT) as well as extracellular ice formation within the bark were determined for three woody species with different degrees of frost resistance, Betula nana, Betula albosinensis and Castanea sativa. Current-year stems and at least 2-year old stems of B. nana and C. sati...

Cuticles are extracellular membranes covering the primary aerial parts of vascular plants. They consist of a multifunctional polymeric material with embedded soluble components called waxes, and serve as the interface between plants and their atmospheric environment, first of all protecting them from desiccation. Remarkably, damaged wax layers may...

Morphometric characters of fossil leaves such as size and shape are important and widely used sources for reconstructing palaeoenvironments. Various tools, including CLAMP or Leaf Margin Analysis, utilize leaf traits as input parameters for estimating palaeoclimate, mostly based on correlations between traits and climate parameters of extant plants...

Aktuelle Studien zur Evolution bestimmter Moos-Arten zeigen spannende neue Einblicke in die genetischen Mechanismen hinter der Entstehung neuer Arten. Eine dieser Moos-Arten, das Kleine Blasenmützenmoos, dient der Wissenschaft seit vielen Jahren als Modellorganismus und seine Erbinformation ist vollständig entschlüsselt. Das macht es und andere Mit...

Pflanzen, die in Gebieten mit kalten Wintern wachsen, nutzen zahlreiche Strategien, um mit niedrigen Temperaturen und sich abwechselnden Gefrier- und Auftauereignissen zurecht zu kommen. Eine dieser Strategien besteht darin, abzusterben und mit unterirdischen Speicherorganen oder als Samen zu überwintern. Zahlreiche Arten bauen ihre oberirdischen P...

During land plant development cold hardiness was an evolutionary factor in regions showing subzero conditions, seasonally and/or due to altitude. One interesting and essential fact of cold hardiness is freezing avoidance by extracellular ice formation. Since freezing avoidance was considered mainly in seed plants, we studied freezing avoidance in E...

During land plant evolution, cold hardiness developed in various groups to allow survival of above ground plant parts under freezing conditions. Freezing avoidance by extracellular ice formation represents one essential component of cold hardiness, and was considered so far mainly in seed plants. Here we studied extracellular freezing in Equisetum...

Formation of extracellular ice at specific positions in the plant interior is a common and probably essential component of plant cold hardiness. Studies on extracellular freezing in spore-bearing plants are, however, scarce. In this study, extracellular ice formation in the cold hardy horsetail Equisetum hyemale L. is analyzed. Horsetails show an e...

To address questions related to the acceleration or deceleration of the global hydrological cycle or links between the carbon and water cycles over land, reliable data for past climatic conditions based on proxies are required. In particular, the reconstruction of palaeoatmospheric CO2 content (Ca) is needed to assist the separation of natural from...

Numerous data based on extant vegetation reveal global patterns of relationships between functional leaf traits and climate. Leaf life span (LLS), i.e. evergreen vs. deciduous leaves, represents a central parameter linking functional traits related to the global leaf economics spectrum. Paleogene climate transitions are therefore expected to be ref...

Aerial roots of epiphytic orchids cannot absorb water from the soil but supply the plant by collecting atmospheric water together with dissolved nutrients. A special outer tissue layer, the velamen radicum (VR), consisting of dead cells, is crucial for water interception and absorption. In this contribution, the VR is explored as an intricate porou...

Biological evolution drives morphological diversity via genetic variation and results in a high level of adaptation, performance and resource efficiency. However, “biological design” arising from evolution is often counterintuitive and unexpected in a non-linear way. Evolutionary processes are undirected and very good at exploring novel design poss...

During their evolutionary history, plants have developed an amazing resistance to various weather conditions, in particular with regard to temperatures below freezing point. In contrast, a phase change of the pore-space content from (liquid) water to (solid) ice within standard construction materials frequently leads to damage. Therefore, our visio...

The Oligocene was a period of profound climatic and biotic changes, coinciding with a shift from a mostly ice-free warmhouse world at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary to a globally cooler, more seasonal climate. The Rauenberg locality (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) is one of the most significant early Oligocene fossil assemblages in Europe, containing b...

Temperatures below freezing point represent a common threat to standard construction materials, as a phase change of the pore content from liquid water to solid ice frequently leads to damage. However, frost-resistant plants are able to withstand many cycles of freezing and thawing without any damage. Hence, the objective is to identify and analyse...

Crinoids, members of the phylum Echinodermata, are passive suspension feeders and catch plankton without producing an active feeding current. Today, the stalked forms are known only from deep water habitats, where flow conditions are rather constant and feeding velocities relatively low. For feeding, they form a characteristic parabolic filtration...

Particle tracking animation illustrating particle paths inside the crown for the base model with aboral inflow at Vinit = 0.14 m/s (Video speed does not reflect real particle velocity). (MP4)

Particle tracking animation illustrating particle paths inside the crown for the base model with oral inflow at Vinit = 0.14 m/s (Video speed does not reflect real particle velocity). (MP4)

Morphology of a typical recent stalked crinoid. Schematic drawing illustrating general morphologic features as well as the typical feeding position, the parabolic filtration fan, where the arms are bent backwards into the flow and the oral surface of the calyx faces downstream. (TIF)

Comparison of the extent of the recirculation zone at Vinit = 0.14 m/s and Vinit = 0.50 m/s, displaying velocity component u along line X (cf. Fig 7 and Fig 8) for the base model and arms opened. As the linegraph plots illustrate, the enlargement of the recirculation area (indicated by negative values of velocity component u) is only related to an...

Datasets providing values for Fig 6C and 6D, Fig 7E, Fig 8A and 8B, Fig 9C, S2 Fig and S3 Fig. (XLS)

Particle tracking animation illustrating recirculation of plankton for the base model with aboral inflow at Vinit = 0.14 m/s (Video speed does not reflect real particle velocity). (MP4)

Particle tracking animation illustrating particle paths inside the crown for the model with parts of 3 arms capped with aboral inflow at Vinit = 0.14 m/s (Video speed does not reflect real particle velocity). (MP4)

Result comparison of PIV and CFD at Vinit = 0.14 m/s, illustrated as linegraph plots of velocity components V and U at 4 different transect lines (locations indicated by dotted lines in Fig 6). A) Line at widest diameter of the calyx; B) Line at the widest diameter of the crown; C) Line directly behind the end of the arms; D) Line in the wake of th...

Drag values in Newton derived from CFD simulations. Even though no experimental drag data exist for validation, the results indicate general trends that seem reasonable with a drag twice as high for the oral compared to the aboral orientation and generally increasing drag with increasing velocity. The absolute values, however, should be interpreted...

Although being recognized as major force behind speciation in flowering plants, the evolutionary relevance of genome duplication, i.e. polyploidy, remains largely unknown in mosses. Genomic and phylogenetic insights from Physcomitrella patens and related species revealed that polyploidy, likely through hybridization (allopolyploidy), gives rise to...

Fossil angiosperm leaves are important study objects in palaeobotany and provide crucial information on plant evolution, the distribution of taxa in space and time and changes in vegetation structure. Furthermore, numerous morphological and anatomical traits of angiosperm leaves show correlations with climate which renders fossil angiosperm leaves...

The BiNHum project is a collective effort of five natural history museums and research collections of the Humboldt-Ring in Germany to collect, centralize and publish collection data in a unified web portal. The portal and the underlying data workflows provide an extensive set of tools to refine and enrich collection data from various sources. It pr...

Broad-scale analysis of interspecific trait variation is a fundamental approach in comparative ecology to investigate general species–environment relationships, but inferences from environmental and phylogenetic signals are still controversially discussed. However, in palaeoenvironmental research trait variation of fossil floras is often mainly att...

Plant foliage plants provides a wealth of morphometric properties that are influenced by the environment. It therefore represents a valuable source of information for ecological and climatological research. Numerous important and famous fossil floras showing well preserved morphometric leaf traits with high research potential are housed in various...

There is various evidence that the presence of condensed water, e.g. dew, improves plant water relations. Since particularly plants in drier environments are expected to benefit from atmospheric water, it may be assumed that special adaptations promoting exploitation of dew water evolved in these habitats. Surface characteristics affect dewfall and...

The Randeck Maar in S Germany is a well-known fossil lagerstätte with exceptionally preserved fossils, particularly insects and plants, which thrived in and around the maar lake during the Mid-Miocene Climatic Optimum (late Early/early Middle Miocene, mammal zone MN5). We provide the first critical and detailed overview of the fauna and flora with...

The principle of Biomimetics is to derive new technical ideas and design from living nature. To survive and reproduce, plants and animals employ a wide variety of often beautiful structures and astounding functional strategies. The Bromeliaceae are a South American plant group in which numerous species do not take up water from the soil, as is usua...

BiNHum (http://wiki.binhum.net) is a project of five natural history museums and research collections representing the Humboldt-Ring: the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK), the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS), the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn (ZFMK), the Bavarian Natural History Collections in...

The late Oligocene represents a comparatively cool phase followed by a warming event, the so-called Late Oligocene Warming that predates the Mi-1 glacial event at the Oligocene–Miocene transition. There is evidence that these climate events were linked to level changes in atmospheric CO2. In this study, atmospheric CO2 from the late Oligocene to th...

Background and AimsThe large distance between peripheral leaf regions and the petiole in large leaves is expected to cause stronger negative water potentials at the leaf apex and marginal zones compared with more central or basal leaf regions. Leaf zone-specific differences in water supply and/or gas exchange may therefore be anticipated. In this s...

In the Cenozoic era, global climate changed from greenhouse to icehouse conditions. During the Oligocene, the comparatively cool phase in the earlier part of the late Oligocene is followed by the Late Oligocene Warming and a major glaciation event at the Oligocene-Miocene transition (Mi-1). Various studies indicate that these climate events were co...

Background and AimsCold neutron radiography was applied to directly observe embolism in conduits of liana stems with the aim to evaluate the suitability of this method for studying embolism formation and repair. Potential advantages of this method are a principally non-invasive imaging approach with low energy dose compared with synchrotron X-ray r...