LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Wood density and hydraulic traits influence species’ growth response to drought across biomes

Photo from wikipedia

Tree species display a wide variety of water‐use strategies, growth rates and capacity to tolerate drought. However, if we want to forecast species capacity to cope with increasing aridity and… Click to show full abstract

Tree species display a wide variety of water‐use strategies, growth rates and capacity to tolerate drought. However, if we want to forecast species capacity to cope with increasing aridity and drought, we need to identify which measurable traits confer resilience to drought across species. Here, we use a global tree ring network (65 species; 1931 site series of ring‐width indices—RWI) to evaluate the relationship of long‐term growth‐drought sensitivity (RWI‐SPEI drought index relationship) and short‐term growth response to extreme drought episodes (resistance, recovery and resilience indices) with functional traits related to leaf, wood and hydraulic properties. Furthermore, we assess the influence of climate (temperature, precipitation and climatic water deficit) on these trait‐growth relationships. We found a close correspondence between the long‐term relationship between RWI and SPEI and resistance and recovery of tree growth to severe drought episodes. Species displaying a stronger RWI‐SPEI relationship to drought and low resistance and high recovery to extreme drought episodes tended to have a higher wood density (WD) and more negative leaf minimum water potential (Ψmin). Such associations were largely maintained when accounting for direct climate effects. Our results indicate that, at a cross‐species level and global scale, wood and hydraulic functional traits explain species’ growth responses to drought at short‐ and long‐term scales. These trait‐growth response relationships can improve our understanding of the cross‐species capacity to withstand climate change and inform models to better predict drought effects on forest ecosystem dynamics.

Keywords: growth response; wood density; growth; drought across; drought

Journal Title: Global Change Biology
Year Published: 2022

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.