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Beyond climate
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This review pulls together research on how city life—things like compacted soil, pollution, road salt, artificial night lighting, and even microplastics—affects the growth rings and internal structure of urban trees, not just the usual suspects like temperature and rainfall. The takeaway matters because trees are one of our best tools for cooling cities and cleaning air, so understanding what's stressing them out helps cities plant and care for trees in ways that keep these health benefits coming. Notably, this is an early attempt to seriously consider how microplastics might be affecting tree biology, an area that's still poorly understood.
Urban trees are increasingly exposed to persistent anthropogenic drivers that extend beyond climatic forcing and fundamentally alter the conditions of secondary growth. While climatic controls of cambial phenology and xylogenesis are well established, the mechanisms by which non-climatic drivers regulate cambial activity and wood formation remain fragmented and are often inferred only indirectly. Here, we develop a cambium-centred framework to synthesise current evidence on how anthropogenic drivers shape wood formation in urban and peri-urban trees. To our knowledge, this is among the first syntheses explicitly linking anthropogenic drivers to distinct stages of xylogenesis. Anthropogenic drivers are typically chronic, spatially heterogeneous, and temporally decoupled from seasonal climatic rhythms, and may alter cambial kinetics and generate anatomical signatures not captured by ring width alone. We evaluate major driver domains, including root-zone constraints, altered hydrology, urban microclimate, pollution, salinity, and mechanical disturbance, while also considering emerging drivers such as artificial light at night and microplastics. Evidence is stratified into three levels: direct observations, indirect physiological evidence, and mechanistic plausibility. Across driver classes, three recurrent anatomical patterns emerge: reduced conduit size under hydraulic or osmotic stress
More Papers Like This
Beyond Climate: A Cambium-Centred Synthesis of Anthropogenic Drivers of Wood Formation in Urban Trees
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This review paper looks at how city life—things like pollution, road salt, artificial light at night, and even microplastics in the soil—affects how trees grow their wood, not just weather and climate. Understanding this matters because urban trees under constant stress may become weaker or less resilient over time, which affects their ability to cool our neighborhoods, clean the air we breathe, and support the leafy green spaces linked to better mental and physical health. While the microplastics angle is still an emerging area with limited direct evidence, it's a signal that pollution's reach into the natural systems we rely on may be broader than we realized.
Abiotic Stress Responses in Woody Plants: Morphological, Physiological, and Anatomical Features
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This review summarizes how various environmental stresses including flood, drought, temperature extremes, salt, heavy metals, and microplastics affect the growth and internal structure of trees and woody plants. The section on microplastics is one of several stress factors covered, noting that microplastics can disrupt plant water transport and root development. While primarily a plant biology review, the inclusion of microplastics as a recognized abiotic stressor for trees reflects growing awareness that plastic pollution affects terrestrial ecosystems and the plants within them.
Responses of Physiological, Morphological and Anatomical Traits to Abiotic Stress in Woody Plants
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This review examines how trees and woody plants respond to environmental stresses including drought, flooding, extreme temperatures, heavy metals, and microplastics. Microplastics in soil can disrupt water transport and nutrient uptake in trees, potentially affecting forest health and the broader ecosystem. The effects of combined stresses, such as microplastics plus drought, are not simply additive and need further study.
Uptake and physiological impacts of nanoplastics in trees with divergent water use strategies
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Researchers studied how nanoplastics are taken up by tree roots and whether this uptake affects tree health and function. They found that trees did absorb nanoplastics through their root systems, and the particles caused oxidative stress and reduced photosynthetic capacity. The study suggests that plastic pollution in soil could impair the functioning of trees, which play a critical role in carbon sequestration and ecosystem health.
Growth, Root, Photosynthetic, and Soil Responses of Poplar Seedlings to an Equal-Mass PVC–PE–PS Microplastic Mixture
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Scientists found that when tree seedlings grew in soil with moderate-to-high levels of mixed microplastics (a blend of common plastic types like PVC and PE), the plants had stunted roots, weaker photosynthesis, and more cell damage, plus the soil itself lost some of its nutrient and enzyme health. This matters because it shows microplastic pollution isn't just a concern for oceans and animals, it can also weaken the soil and trees we rely on for reforestation and clean air, which ultimately ties back to the broader environmental systems that support human health.
Research digests by email
When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.