Sprecher
Beschreibung
Plants could be considered as ‘living rocks’ based on their multi-elemental composition. They play a disproportionately important role in terrestrial biogeochemical cycling of elements compared with other living organisms, particularly at times of extreme environmental change such as mass extinction intervals. It is widely acknowledged that terrestrial plants are ecosystem engineers however considering their potential to alter soil and sedimentary profiles via the processes of weathering, decomposition and homeostais this paper will put forward the hypothesis that plants are lithosphere engineers or modulators of sedimentary profiles. Results from evolutionary decomposition and weathering experiments will be reviewed and integrated with new data on transcriptomic and plant elementome responses to extreme paleo-atmospheres experiments. These multidisciplinary data sets will be used to introduce the concept of the paleo-elementome for application to fossil plants and to hypothesize what the fossil plant paleo-elementome can tell us about plant mass extinction and terrestrial ecosystem collapse in the geological past.