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Climatic conditions are key determinants of plant growth, whether at the scale of temperature regulation of the cell cycle, or at the scale of the geographic limits for a particular species. The climate is changing, due to human activities - particularly the emission of greenhouse gases - and therefore the conditions for the establishment, growth, reproduction, survival and distribution of plant species are changing.

This volume explores plant growth and anthropogenic climate change, considering the effects of ecology on physiology, and agricultural as well as wider vegetation science. It focuses on the features of climate that are important to plants, emphasising aspects of temporal pattern, seasonality and extremes. Individual chapters discuss the mechanisms underlying physiological and ecological responses to the key variables in climate change - in particular, changing plant function over time (acclimation) and also between species (adaptation), functional types and growth forms. The complexities of these interactions are illustrated with reviews of recent experimental manipulations of plants at the community level in a wide range of environments, and the roles and limitations of the models widely used to predict plant growth and productivity from climate information are examined.