New England stone walls deserve a science of their own

The abandoned fieldstone walls of New England are every bit as iconic to the region as lobster pots, town greens, sap buckets and fall foliage. They seem to be everywhere—a latticework of dry, lichen-crusted stone ridges ...

Q&A: How extreme weather impacts fall foliage

After a summer of extreme weather—historic rainfall, devastating floods, wildfire smoke—leaf peeping season has finally arrived in Vermont and New England.

How does climate change impact fall foliage?

Although fall officially began on September 22, the trees around Palisades, New York, don't seem to know it yet. At the Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a camera sits on a rooftop monitoring the ...

Why climate change is making it harder to chase fall foliage

Droughts that cause leaves to turn brown and wither before they can reach peak color. Heat waves prompting leaves to fall before autumn even arrives. Extreme weather events like hurricanes that strip trees of their leaves ...

Satellite images keep tabs on fall foliage

Catching the fall foliage at its peak in the United States just became a little easier, thanks to the work of senior scientist Xiaoyang Zhang of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence at South Dakota State University.

Red spruce reviving in New England, but why?

In the 1970s, red spruce was the forest equivalent of a canary in the coal mine, signaling that acid rain was damaging forests and that some species, especially red spruce, were particularly sensitive to this human induced ...

Deserts 'greening' from rising CO2

Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world's arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilisation, according to CSIRO research.

Elevated carbon dioxide making arid regions greener

Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's ...

Western aspen trees commonly carry extra set of chromosomes

A large proportion of aspen in the western U.S. sport an extra set of chromosomes in their cells, a phenomenon termed triploidy, according to new research published Oct. 31 in the open access journal PLoS ONE by Karen Mock ...

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Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants.

Typically a leaf is a thin, flattened organ borne above ground and specialized for photosynthesis, but many types of leaves are adapted in ways almost unrecognisable in those terms: not flat (such as many succulent leaves and conifers), not above ground (such as bulb scales), or without photosynthetic function (consider for example cataphylls, spines, and cotyledons).

Conversely, many structures of non-vascular plants, or even of some lichens, do look and function much like leaves. Several structures found in vascular plants look like leaves but have different structures; examples include phyllodes and phylloclades.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA