Ruike Huang, Ye Wang, Jie Duan, Benye Xi, Jinyan Yang, Ximeng Li, Jinchao Feng, Brendan Choat, David T Tissue
This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here.
For most terrestrial plants, water is often limited, while global warming may intensify the water crisis as the climate becomes drier. To gain sufficient water, plants must adjust over time to fit the variable environment. For a given genotype, such adjustment can occur within the life history, which is called phenotypic plasticity, or realized over generations through a shift in gene frequencies of the population. Phenotypic plasticity is often thought to be advantageous because it allows plants to rapidly adapt to changing climate.
Plant water use can be described by many quantifiable characteristics, which are collectively termed hydraulic traits. Among others, the capacity of xylem to deliver water, and its ability to withstand the interruption of water transport by air embolism, are of prime importance in determining the growth and survival of plants. Given that the xylem of plants consists of cells that are dead at maturity, it is generally postulated that these traits are not responsive to the environment, and therefore the relationship among the traits, which largely defines the plant strategy, will not be altered. However, this concept remains to be systematically verified.
By compiling studies about the phenotypic plasticity of plant hydraulics, we showed that adjustments of xylem embolism resistance and conductivity depend on the type of environmental stimuli, and can be highly species-specific. Generally, reduced moisture increased embolism resistance and CO2 enrichment promotes hydraulic conductivity, with the variation in magnitude of adjustments depending on the taxonomic category. Despite this, correlations among traits under unique environments remained robust. Furthermore, the relationships between climate and these traits differed between inter-specific and intra-specific levels. The results of our study highlight the value of traits correlation in predicting vegetation dynamics and adaptation to water availability within species.
Functional Ecology: Plain Language Summaries 