An increase in carbon dioxide amounts caused by stronger climate change is expected to limit the process by which plants turn nitrate into proteins thus possibly hindering food quality, which is scarce in the desert.
According to a press release from UC Davis, and a study printed in the science journal Nature Climate Change the situation is expected to hugely effect the crops as the situation strengthens.
The scientists looked at different portions of wheat which grew in 1996, and 1997 in Phoenix Maricopa Agricultural Center the press release reported.
"It is definitely not going to stop it, just now we are understanding the processes that are going on," Dave Evans one of the main authors of the study told NBC News. "But we are still seeing huge amounts of carbon accumulating in the atmosphere," Evans told NBC News. Evans is also an ecology, and global change biologist at Washington State University told NBC News.
"After 10 years, the experiment stopped and we dug everything up to ask the question: Is there more carbon under future carbon dioxide conditions than there are under current conditions," Evans told NBC News. "And what we found was, there was indeed more carbon. During those 10 years, carbon accumulated at a faster rate under future CO2 conditions."
According to the press release, nitrogen is vital to how a plant develops, and how much it does so at a time. This involves the way nitrogen produces itself to help the plants grow. "Food quality is declining under the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we are experiencing," Arnold Bloom, a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis told Science Recorder. "Several explanations for this decline have been put forward, but this is the first study to demonstrate that elevated carbon dioxide inhibits the conversion of nitrate into protein in a field-grown crop," Bloom told Science Recorder.
