The Climate Feedback of Potential Photosynthetic Efficiency: A Meta-Analysis Utilizing SIF

Solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) emissions are an indicator of vegetative feedback to climate change and is being incorporated into the Earth system models for improving the predictive power of vegetation-climate feedbacks. This effort requires an explicit understanding of how plant carbon assimilation acclimates to climate change through regulatory actions of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) partitioning among photosynthesis, non-photochemical quenching, heat dissipation, and solar induced fluorescence, and how these regulatory systems vary with plant functional types (PFTs) and magnitude and persistency of environmental stresses. To addresses these questions, we performed a meta-analysis to investigate potential photosynthetic efficiency and its acclimation to climate change for diverse plant functional types. By integrating 105 Pulse Amplitude Modulated (PAM) fluorometry studies that reported the maximum quantum efficiency of PSII system (PSIImax) under specific temperature and leaf water potential, we derived predictable modeling of potential photosynthetic efficiency in response to changing temperature and leaf water potentials. Our study indicated that different PFTs could maintain its potential photosynthetic efficiency under a specific range of temperature and leaf water potential. The sensitivities of PSIImax to changing temperature or leaf water potential strongly correlate with plant functional types and time held at specific climate stress. These results will prepare a global-scale database for developing SIF-enabled photosynthetic modeling, allowing the assimilation of satellite-based SIF measurements to study terrestrial carbon-climate feedbacks at a global scale.