Overlooked Sunfleck Properties and Potential Implications for Crop Improvement

ABSTRACT Sunflecks are ubiquitous in crop canopies, yet their properties are understudied. Recent data indicates that on sunny days, wind‐induced sunflecks within crop canopies (windflecks) occur roughly twice per second and at amplitudes of roughly 10% of full sunlight. However, studies on the effects of fluctuating light on photosynthesis and plant growth often use fluctuations that do not resemble sunflecks, possibly resulting in irrelevant crop improvement targets. In this review, first, we quantify this mismatch between experiments and reality, showing that most studies measuring light intensities in crop canopies did so too infrequently to capture all sunfleck properties, while studies either simulating dynamic photosynthesis or growing plants under fluctuating light did so using much slower fluctuations than those often encountered in the field. Second, we attempted to estimate th…