Department of Population Ecology

Martin Bouda from our department published the solution for a hundred-year-old riddle revealing key plant adaptation to dry land in Science

The green world that we live in would not have been possible without hidden changes to the plant body over the last 400 million years. To grow beyond just centimetres tall outside of the wettest places on land, plants had to re-arrange their water-conducting tissues to keep them safe from drought. A new study by Martin Bouda of the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Science and co-authors, published in the journal Science, shows how the solution to a hundred-year-old debate in botany reveals a key adaptation that allowed plants to colonise dry land. Find out more in the press release.

Congratulations!!!

Martin Bouda, Brett A. Huggett, Kyra A. Prats, Jay W. Wason, Jonathan P. Wilson, Craig R. Brodersen:

„Hydraulic failure as a primary driver of xylem network evolution in early vascular plants,“ doi:10.1126/science.add2910, Science (2022)