How the breath of leaves changes the air we breathe

When leaves breathe, they change the air. They are often known for breathing in bad parts of the air and breathing out good parts of the air, but leaves do more than just that. I study the parts of that breath that smell good, like the ones you smell when you walk through a lot of trees. Those good smells are busy in the sky, and they make new air parts that can be either good or bad for us. This means that the smell that leaves breathe are important when we think about what the next few years (or next few hundred years) will be like.

However, when the leaves change, so do the smells they breathe out. This can happen when leaves are made warmer or colder, when the leaves don't have enough water, or even when the leaves are growing. We know it's important that those smells change, but we don't know exactly how the breath of leaves change. There are so many types of smells, too. We care both about the type and how much of each smell is breathed out.

To study this, I take care of leaves and I look at their breath when they are happy and when they are sad. I warm leaves, take away their water, change their light, and I breathe on them. Sometimes, I even look at the breath of dead leaves. To study this breath, I hug the leaves, one at a time, in a box that lets me control the space around each of the leaves. The box gives them light, water, and air food, and it can control how warm or cool the air is. While hugging the leaves, I also catch their breath on a can that's open on both sides. That can is then warmed up inside, and then I get to see what good smells were coming out of the leaves that day. Once I know how many and what type of good smells came out of the leaves, I make a relationship between how happy the leaves are and what's in their breath. People will use this relationship to make ideas about what tomorrow will be like, and hundreds of years after that.