Carbon Coordinated Ecophysiological Responses of Plants to Environmental Stresses
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Response to Abiotic Stress and Climate Change".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2027 | Viewed by 25
Editors
Interests: plant physiology; applied plant biology; plant response to abiotic stresses
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate change is increasingly exposing plants to more frequent and intense droughts, heatwaves, and flooding events across both agricultural and natural systems. These stressors are already affecting plant productivity, resilience, and survival, with important implications for ecosystem functioning, carbon sequestration, and vegetation management. Improving our mechanistic understanding of how woody plants respond to these environmental challenges is therefore a key priority for predicting vegetation dynamics under future climate scenarios.
In recent years, the coordination between plant hydraulic functioning and carbon metabolism has emerged as a central framework for interpreting plant responses to abiotic stress. Plant hydraulic status strongly constrains carbon assimilation through stomatal regulation and transport processes, while carbon availability supports maintenance respiration, osmotic adjustment, defence mechanisms, and post-stress recovery. Increasing evidence suggests that plant survival under stress depends on the dynamic interplay between hydraulic failure and carbon limitation, as well as on the capacity of plants to buffer disturbances through stored carbon reserves.
Within this context, non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) play a crucial role as metabolic substrates, osmotic regulators, and mediators of phloem transport efficiency and recovery processes. However, the mechanistic relationships linking NSC dynamics with hydraulic functioning, drought legacy effects, phloem transport constraints, and stress recovery remain insufficiently understood, particularly in wild species and across temporal and spatial scales.
The Special Issue welcomes contributions addressing the coordination between carbon dynamics and hydraulic functioning in plants across agricultural and natural systems. Original research articles, reviews, and modelling studies spanning scales from the molecular to the ecosystem level are particularly welcome. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Interactions between carbon allocation and plant hydraulic functioning;
- Roles of non-structural carbohydrates in stress tolerance and recovery;
- Hydraulic failure and carbon limitation in plant mortality mechanisms;
- Phloem transport regulation under abiotic stress;
- Seasonal and long-term NSC dynamics in woody plants;
- Drought and flooding legacy effects on plant performance;
- Carbon–water interactions shaping resilience under climate extremes.
Dr. Valentino Casolo
Dr. Sara Gargiulo
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- carbohydrates
- stress response
- carbon investment
- xylem
- phloem transport
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