Leaves_Compute

Abstract

Control of gas exchange between a leafs interior and the surrounding air is accomplished by variations in the turgor pressures in the small epidermal and guard cells that cover the leafs surface. These pressures respond to changes in light intensity and color, temperature, CO2 concentration, and air humidity. The dynamical equations that describe these processes are formally identical to those that define computation in a two layer, adaptive, cellular nonlinear network. This identification suggests that leaf gas exchange processes can be understood as a kind of analog computation