Browsing by Author "Leigh, Andrea"

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    A Framework for Modelling Thermal Load Sensitivity Across Life
    (John Wiley & Sons, 2025) Arnold, Pieter A.; Noble, Daniel W. A.; Nicotra, Adrienne B.; Kearney, Michael R.; Rezende Landaeta, Enrico; Andrew, Samuel C.; Briceño, Verónica F.; Buckley, Lauren B.; Christian, Keith A.; Clusella‐Trullas, Susana; Geange, Sonya R.; Guja, Lydia K.; Jiménez Robles, Octavio; Kefford, Ben J.; Kellermann, Vanessa; Leigh, Andrea; Marchin, Renée M.; Mokany, Karel; Bennett, Joanne M.
    Forecasts of vulnerability to climate warming require an integrative understanding of how species are exposed to, are damaged by, and recover from thermal stress in natural environments. The sensitivity of species to temperature depends on the frequency, duration, and magnitude of thermal stress. Thus, there is a generally recognized need to move beyond physiological metrics based solely on critical thermal limits and integrate them with natural heat exposure regimes. Here we propose the thermal load sensitivity (TLS) framework, which integrates biophysical principles for quantifying exposure with physiological principles of the dynamics of damage and repair processes in driving sublethal impacts on organisms. Building upon the established thermal death time (TDT) model, which integrates both the magnitude and duration of stress, the TLS framework attempts to disentangle the accumulation of damage and subsequent repair processes that alter responses to thermal stress. With the aid of case studies and reproducible simulation examples, we discuss how the TLS framework can be applied to enhance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of heat stress responses. These include assessing thermal sensitivity across diverse taxonomic groups, throughout ontogeny, and for modular organisms, as well as integrating additional stressors in combination with temperature. We identify critical research opportunities, knowledge gaps, and novel ways of integrating physiological measures of thermal sensitivity to improve understanding and predictions of thermal vulnerability at various scales across life.
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    Beyond a single temperature threshold: applying a cumulative thermal stress framework to plant heat tolerance
    (2023) Cook, Alicia; Rezende Landaeta, Enrico; Petrou, Katherina; Leigh, Andrea
    Most plant thermal tolerance studies focus on single critical thresholds, which are arbitrary and phenomenological, limiting the generality of findings across studies. In animals and microbes, thermal tolerance landscapes describe the more realistic, cumulative effects of temperature. We tested this in plants by measuring the decline in leaf photosynthetic efficiency (F/F) of two species following a combination of temperatures and exposure times. As predicted by the thermal tolerance landscape framework, we demonstrate that a general relationship between stressful temperatures and exposure durations can be effectively employed to quantify and compare heat tolerance within and across plant species and over time. We also show how F/F curves translate to natural conditions, suggesting that natural environmental temperatures often impair photosynthetic function. Our findings provide more robust descriptors of heat tolerance in plants, and suggest that heat tolerance in disparate groups of organisms can be studied with a single analytical framework.