Internal Seed Structure of Alpine Plants and Extreme Cold Exposure

Ganesh K. Jaganathan and Sarah E. Dalrymple
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Ganesh K. Jaganathan: Institute of Biothermal Technology, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 20009, China
Sarah E. Dalrymple: School of Natural Sciences & Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK

Data, 2019, vol. 4, issue 3, 1-10

Abstract: Cold tolerance in seeds is not well understood compared to mechanisms in aboveground plant tissue but is crucial to understanding how plant populations persist in extreme cold conditions. Counter-intuitively, the ability of seeds to survive extreme cold may become more important in the future due to climate change projections. This is due to the loss of the insulating snow bed resulting in the actual temperatures experienced at soil surface level being much colder than without snow cover. Seed survival in extremely low temperatures is conferred by mechanisms that can be divided into freezing avoidance and freezing tolerance depending on the location of ice crystal formation within the seed. We present a dataset of alpine angiosperm species with seed mass and seed structure defined as endospermic and non-endospermic. This is presented alongside the locations of temperature minima per species which can be used to examine the extent to which different seed structures are associated with snow cover. We hope that the dataset can be used by others to demonstrate if certain seed structures and sizes are associated with snow cover, and if so, would they be negatively impacted by the loss of snow resulting from climate change.

Keywords: endosperm; intracellular ice formation; climate change; temperature minima; seed mass; snow bed (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 C80 C81 C82 C83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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