Climate change is posing new challenges to the production of tea and the livelihoods of farmers. Our Collaborator Wenyan Han, along with Colin Orians and Selena Ahmed, edited a special research topic for Frontiers in Plant Science entitled, “Responses of Tea Plants to Climate Change: From Molecules to Ecosystems.” Articles in this series take a global view of recent developments in the field. Our team contributed three articles:

• Scott, E.R., X. Li., J.P. Wei, N. Kfoury, J. Morimoto, M.M. Guo, A. Robbat, A.Ahmed, S.B. Cash, T.S. Griffin, J.R. Stepp, W. Han, and C.M. and Orians. 2020. Changes in tea plant secondary metabolite profiles as a function of leafhopper density and damage. Front. Plant Sci. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2020.00636.
• Kfoury, N., E.R. Scott, C.M. Orians, S. Ahmed, S.B. Cash, T. Griffin, C. Matyas, J.R. Stepp, W. Han, D. Xue, C. Long, and A. Robbat, Jr. 2019. Plant-Climate Interaction Effects: Changes in the Relative Distribution and Concentration of the Volatile Tea Leaf Metabolome in 2014–2016. Front. Plant Sci. 10:1518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2019.01518
• Ahmed S., T.S. Griffin, D. Kraner, M.K. Schaffner, D. Sharma, M. Hazel, A.R. Leitch, C.M. Orians, W. Han, J.R. Stepp, A. Robbat, Jr., C. Matyas, C. Long, D. Xue, R.F. Houser, and S.B. Cash. 2019. Environmental factors variably impact tea secondary metabolites in the context of climate change. Front. Plant Sci. 10:939. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2019.00939

The latest collection on Nature Outlook is all about tea!  Members of our team were interviewed for two articles in particular:

•  The growth of tea: Genetic studies of today’s tea plants are providing clues to how the plant was first domesticated.

• How climate change might affect tea: Changes in temperature and rainfall patterns can affect the growing season, flavour and health benefits of tea.

Our project is on ResearchGate and Mendeley.  Subscribe to receive updates and new publications as they come out.

Several new publications by our team have come out recently.  Several chapters in a new book, Stress Physiology of Tea in the Face of Climate Change, were authored by members of our team—both in the US and by our collaborators in China.

Nicole Kfoury and co-authors published a paper on the effects of seasonal monsoon rains on metals in tea in Chemosphere.

Eric Scott and co-authors published a paper on the interactive effects of drought and simulated insect herbivory on tea metabolites in Environmental and Experimental Botany.