Definition: Determined for type of life cycle being annual, biennial, perennial etc.
Comment: The life cycle habit indicates the typical duration of an individual plant's life. Common values are annual, biennial, and perennial. Some plants have different durations depending on environment or location, so a plant can have more than one value.
Definition: Of plant duration, a plant whose life span extends over more than two growing seasons, c.f. annual, biennial, ephemeral, of flowering with respect to architecture, hapaxanthic, monocarpic, pleonanthic
Definition: the biochemical pathway a plant uses to gain carbon for growth and reproduction. Plants have evolved three photosynthetic pathways, each in response to distinct environmental conditions, resulting in differences in their ecological patterns of growth and distribution.
Definition: Crassulacean acid metabolism. A carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions.[1] In a plant using full CAM, the stomata in the leaves remain shut during the day to reduce evapotranspiration, but open at night to collect carbon dioxide (CO2). The CO2 is stored as the four-carbon acid malate in vacuoles at night, and then in the daytime, the malate is transported to chloroplasts where it is converted back to CO2, which is then used during photosynthesis.
