We’ve just returned from a 10-day field trip to Japan where our collaborators Qingwei Wang and Hiroko Kurakawa are studying the effects of shortwave solar radiation on the growth and subsequent decomposition of leaves from shade tolerant and light demanding plant species in controlled experiments under low and high light conditions.
This visit included a fascinating trip to a beech forest in central Japan to an experiment where the rate of leaf litter decomposition is being compared over 1-year on the forest floor and in an open area under filters screening out various parts of the solar spectrum, in an attempt to estimate the role that photodegradation plays in the decomposition from leaves of different functional types of forest plant in open and shaded environments.
A complimentary experiment at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Tsukuba City is testing how these species grow under waveband-selective filters, and whether generalisations between plant life forms can be made about the role of these different wavebands in growth and physiology as well as decomposition.