Advancing our understanding of plant thermal tolerance through thermal damage accumulation predictions

The thermal death time (TDT) model suggests that the duration a plant can tolerate thermal stress decreases exponentially as the intensity of the temperature becomes more extreme. However, the critical assumption of the TDT model, which is additive damage accumulation, remains unverified for plants. We assessed thermal damage in Thymus vulgaris under different heat and cold treatments and used TDT models to predict thermal failure of photosynthesis. We used TDT models to examine the role of plant’s production of different monoterpenes in relation to thermal stress tolerance. We found that thermal damage is additive for both heat and cold stress, and that the TDT model can quantify the effect of monoterpene identity on plant thermal tolerance. Using published studies, we tested the general applicability of this framework in plants and found that traditional methods ignoring stress duration may inaccurately predict plant responses to global warming.