Perennial plant species from water-limiting environments (including climates of extreme drought, heat and freezing temperatures) have evolved traits that allow them to tolerate these conditions. As such, traits that are associated with water stress may show evidence of adaptation to climate when compared among closely related species inhabiting contrasting climatic conditions. In this study, we tested whether key hydraulic traits linked to drought stress, including the vulnerability of leaves to embolism (P50 leaf) and the minimum diffusive conductance of shoots (gmin), were associated with climatic characteristics of 14 Tasmanian eucalypt species from sites that vary in precipitation and temperature. Across species, greater cavitation resistance (more negative P50 leaf) was associated with increasing aridity and decreasing minimum temperature. By contrast, gmin showed strong associations with aridity only. Among these Tasmanian eucalypts, evidence suggests that trait variation is influenced by both cold and dry conditions, highlighting the need to consider both aspects when exploring adaptive trait-climate relationships.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpad065 | DOI Listing |
Nat Ecol Evol
January 2025
ARC Centre for Plant Success in Nature & Agriculture, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Wind is an important ecological factor for plants as it can increase evapotranspiration and cause dehydration. However, the impact of wind on plant hydraulics at a global scale remains unclear. Here we compiled plant key hydraulic traits, including water potential at 50% loss of hydraulic conductivity (P), xylem-specific hydraulic conductivity (K), leaf area to sapwood area ratio (A/A) and conduit diameter (D) with 2,786 species-at-site combinations across 1,922 woody species at 469 sites worldwide and analysed their correlations with wind speed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Data
December 2024
Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
We present a dataset of plant hydraulic and structural traits imputed for 55,779 tree species based on TRY plant trait dataset observations and phylogenetic relationships. We collected plant trait values for maximum stomatal conductance (gs), xylem pressure at 12%, 50%, and 88% conductance loss (P12, P50, P88), maximum observed rooting depth (rd), photosynthetic Water Use Efficiency (WUE), maximum plant height (height), Specific Leaf Area (SLA), and leaf Nitrogen content (LeafN). We demonstrated that each of these traits exhibited remarkably large phylogenetic signals across all land plants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
December 2024
Department of Geography & Spatial Information/Center for Land and Marine Spatial Utilization and Governance Research, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Summer heatwaves have caused a distinct mortality between urban greening and native plants. However, there are insufficient studies revealing the underlying mechanisms. We hypothesized that differentiation in hydraulic traits and their integration cause the varied heatwave-induced damages between the two plant types.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTree Physiol
December 2024
Department of Forest Science, Soil and Environment, School of Agricultural Sciences, Botucatu, São Paulo State University, São Paulo 01049-010, Brazil.
Amazonian species are generally unable to adapt to long drought periods, indicating a low capacity to adjust their hydraulic traits. Secondary forests account for 20% of forest cover in the Amazon, making natural regeneration species crucial under climate change scenarios. In this study, we compared the hydraulic traits of five species, including non-pioneers (Bertholletia excelsa Bonpl.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlanta Med
December 2024
Pharmacognosy Institute and Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Illinois Chicago College of Pharmacy, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
This exploratory study was designed to identify factors implicating microbial influence on medicinal plant metabolomes. Utilizing a whole-microbiome approach, amplicon sequencing was used to identify the makeup of fungal and bacterial assemblages from endophytic (interior) and epiphytic (external) environments in two different sets of congeneric host-plant pairs, with collection of multiple samples of two medicinal plant species () and two generic analogs (). Diversity analysis of microbial assemblages revealed the influence of three primary factors driving variance in microbial community composition: host-plant taxonomy, the compartmentalization of microbial communities within discrete plant parts, and the scale of distance (microhabitat heterogeneity) between sampling locations.
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