What can we learn from the ecophysiology of plants inhabiting extreme environments?: from 'sherplants' to 'shercrops'.

Abstract

Already in the 19th Century it was proposed that ecophysiology could be best studied in regions with extreme climatic conditions. In the present perspective, we argue that perhaps this is timelier than ever. The main reason is the need to improve crops to be simultaneously more productive - due to increased population - and more stress-tolerant - due to climate change. Climate change induces plants to face not just the harsh but also the 'unexpected' (unpredictable) climatic conditions. In this sense, we hypothesize that 'sherplants', i.e. plants living in the extremes of plant life (e.g. hot deserts, Arctic and Antarctica, or high elevations) can provide cues on how to break the trade-off between productivity and stress tolerance, as they need to produce fast due to the very short growing period while being stress tolerant due to the harsh and unpredictable climate endured during most of the year. We present glimpses of results from three consecutive projects developed for the last 10 years, in which hundreds of species from different regions of the world have been studied. In particular, we propose a path for developing 'shercrops' learning from 'sherplants', debate whether some of the already studied species may have really broken the aforementioned trade-off, and present a number of interesting 'side' findings achieved when studying plants from extreme climates.