tealeaves

tealeaves calculates leaf temperature from leaf energy budget models to predict leaf thermal dynamics under specified environmental and physiological conditions.

Key Features:

• Energy balance modeling: Employs physical leaf energy budget models to compute incoming and outgoing energy fluxes and resultant leaf temperatures.
• Surface-specific conductances: Supports separate conductances for lower and upper leaf surfaces for heat and water vapor, enabling independent calculation of sensible and latent heat loss from each surface.
• Environmental and trait gradients: Models leaf temperature responses across gradients such as light intensity, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, leaf size, and stomatal conductance.
• R integration and unit handling: Uses the R 'units' package to ensure parameters are specified and transformed with consistent units before calculations.

Scientific Applications:

• Leaf thermal physiology: Simulates leaf temperature dynamics to study thermal regulation mechanisms in leaves.
• Photosynthesis and transpiration trade-offs: Evaluates how temperature affects photosynthetic optimization and water loss via stomatal and boundary layer interactions.
• Thermal stress and damage risk: Assesses conditions leading to extreme leaf temperatures that may cause heat damage.
• Crop and ecological responses to climate: Examines how environmental changes influence leaf temperature with implications for crop resilience and ecosystem functioning.

Methodology:

Implements leaf energy budget models that calculate the balance of incoming and outgoing energy fluxes to compute resultant leaf temperatures, accounts for sensible and latent heat fluxes with separate upper and lower surface conductances for heat and water vapor, and enforces unit consistency using the R 'units' package.