William J. Matthaeus

Trinity College Dublin | TCD · Department of Botany

Terrestrial plants have transformed Earth's surface environments by altering water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles. Studying vegetation-climate interaction in deep time has necessarily relied on modern-plant analogs to represent paleo-ecosystems—as methods for reconstructing paleo- and, in particular, extinct-plant function were lacking. This ap...

Vegetation function and distribution have changed over deep time as plant groups evolved and introduced new adaptations to their environments (plant traits). The succession of the dominant plant groups (i.e. sporophytes, gymnosperms, angiosperms) is usually assumed to have coincided with changing plant impacts on biogeochemical cycles, such as rate...

The evolution of woody stems approximately 400 mya (middle Paleozoic) facilitated the expansion of plants and has likely affected carbon and water budgets across much of the terrestrial surface since that time. Stems are a carbon cost/sink and limit water transport from soil to leaves as it must pass through specialized xylem tissue. While leaf fos...

Significance Computer-assisted studies of natural history that consider extinct plant function contribute to the understanding of how Paleozoic glacial cycles controlled the distribution of forest cover and continental surface erosion. Simulated plant water balance supports widespread vegetation during the late Paleozoic ice age (LPIA). However, ph...

Earth’s tropical forests repeatedly restructured on 105- to 107-year timescales during the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (340–280 Ma). Although it is established that these ancient plants responded to an evolving climate, their thresholds for physiological functioning and how such thresholds led to vegetation-climate feedbacks warrants further investigati...

Supplemental material to Richey et al 2020 Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is widely used to investigate the surface morphology, and physiological state of plant leaves. Conventionally used methods for sample preparation are invasive, irreversible, require skill and expensive equipment, and are time and labor consuming. This study demonstrates a method to obtain in vivo surface informati...

Ecosystem process models provide unique insight into terrestrial ecosystems by employing a modern understanding of ecophysiological processes within a dynamic environmental framework. We apply this framework to deep-time ecosystems made up of extinct plants by constructing plant functional types using fossil remains and simulating-as close as possi...

The effects of resource quality on ecosystems can shift through time based on preferential use and elemental needs of biotic consumers. For example, leaf litter decomposition rates are strongly controlled by initial litter quality, where labile litter is processed and depleted more quickly than recalcitrant litters. We examined the effect of this p...