Cover Picture and Issue Information

Perennial herbaceous plants in seasonal temperate climates (pictured, as an artistic interpretation of plant emotions in coloured inks on paper) have been able to adapt their belowground storage organs to survive along a wide variety of environmental gradients. The storage capacity of these organs is difficult and expensive to assess, thus as a proxy for carbohydrate storage, Bartušková et al. 2021 (doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.13997 ) used drawings to measure the volume, as well as annual growth and turnover, of belowground storage organs from over 200 species in Central Europe. They found that allocation strategy diverged among these three traits, with plants either growing faster or persisting longer but still capable of having the same storage organ volume during any given year. The most influential environmental variables were moisture and disturbance frequency, with plants growing faster in moist environments, but persisting for shorter periods in frequently disturbed environments. Nutrient availability was largely inconsequential, showing that variation in belowground storage organs is not just an artefact of habitat productivity. This study highlights the importance of belowground storage organ traits, but also the need for further study, especially of storage carbohydrate content.