A Unified Survival-Based Energy Framework for Plant Color Stability and Productivity

Plant coloration, expressed through leaf greenness, floral pigmentation, and fruit color intensity, reflects the integrated outcome of pigment biosynthesis, optical absorption, metabolic regulation, and energy–mass exchange with the environment. While the biochemical pathways governing the synthesis and degradation of major pigment classes—including chlorophylls, carotenoids, and anthocyanins—are well established, existing models largely interpret color expression as a localized biochemical phenomenon. Such approaches do not explicitly account for whole-plant energy balance, transpiration-driven losses, or thermodynamic constraints, limiting their ability to explain widely observed patterns of color saturation, stress-induced fading, and species-specific stability across environmental gradients. Here we develop a unified framework for plant color generation and stability that treats pigmentation as a survival-limited energetic process embedded within the broader dynamics of absorption, transport, metabolism, and entropy production. Central to the framework is a dimensionless energy survival factor, Ψ=AE/TE+ε where AE represents absorbed and retained energetic and elemental resources relevant to pigment formation, TE denotes transpiration-linked, metabolic, and environmental dissipation losses, and ε captures irreducible entropy-producing degradation inherent to non-equilibrium biological systems. By construction, 0