Seminar: Lauri Laanisto

“The ultimate guide of mycorrhiza and abiotic stress polytolerance in woody plants“ 

Prof. Lauri Laanisto (Eesti Maaülikool/Estonian University of Life Sciences) 

What do we know about mycorrhizal mediation of abiotic stress in woody plants? Our current understandings of how plants respond to abiotic stress and how mycorrhiza mitigates this stress are almost exclusively limited to considering a single stress factor (usually drought). Studies including tolerance to multiple stress factors and various functional types of mycorrhiza do not yet exists. Functional diversity of both woody plants and mycorrhizal fungi interacting with them, variability of the strength and composition of multiple stress conditions in different regions of the world – all this makes it difficult to predict the patterns of these interactions from both the adaptational and mitigational point of view. I´ll present some preliminary results of a quite robust analysis, where we analyzed, on a global scale, 625 woody species for which we have data for both their tolerance to multiple abiotic stress factors and also about their species-specific mycorrhizal interactions.