Optical properties of the leaf in relation to its anatomical traits

Plant functional traits at the leaf level are commonly used to predict ecosystem responses to environmental factors and describe global climate change processes at the ecosystem level. Plant functional traits include both leaf biophysical traits (e.g., photosynthetic pigment content and water content) and structural traits (e.g., leaf thickness and proportion of photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic tissues). Leaf biophysical and structural traits can be detected either destructively in the laboratory or non-destructively using leaf optical properties. Although estimating chlorophyll content from leaf optical properties is a well-established methodology, the influence of leaf structure and internal anatomy on leaf optical properties has only been thoroughly studied in the last two decades. The papers included in my thesis and my thesis itself are mostly focused on the study of typical European deciduous trees of temperate and hemiboreal forests with leaves having a dorsiventral structure (i.e., the mesophyll is differentiated into palisade and spongy parenchyma). Furthermore, my thesis includes a study on the effect of leaf surface structural traits on optical properties. In this study, two groups of phylogenetically close herbs with comparable internal leaf structure were used (mutants of..