Collaborative Effort to Model Plant Response to Acidic Rain.

摘要

Radish plants were exposed three times per week to simulated acidic rain at pH values of 2.6 to 5.4 over the course of four weeks in trials performed at Argonne, Illinois; Ithaca and Upton, New York; Corvallis, Oregon; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Toronto, Canada. Uniform genotype, soil media and planting techniques, treatment procedures, biological measurements, and experimental design were employed. Growth of plants differed among trials as a result of variation in greenhouse environmental conditions according to location and facilities. Larger plants underwent greater absolute but lower relative reductions in biomass after exposure to the higher levels of acidity. A generalized Mitscherlich function was used to model the effects of acidity of simulated rain on dry mass of hypocotyls using data from three laboratories that performed duplicate trials. The remaining data, from three other laboratories that performed only one trial each, were used to test the model. 14 refs., 2 figs., 7 tabs.