Identification

Title

Global coordination in plant physiological and rooting strategies in response to water stress

Abstract

Plants employ a range of strategies to modulate the impact of water stress, including changes to rooting depth and hydraulic conductance (e.g., xylem conductance). However, it is still poorly understood how these strategies vary in relation to climate and land cover types and how they could coordinate globally. Based on daily microwave vegetation optical depth (VOD) from AMSR-E and AMSR2 over 2002-2011, we estimate two proxies for stress regulation: (a) an effective plant rooting depth (Zr*) and (b) the effective plant hydraulic conductance (Kplant*) to delineate two strategies: deep rooting and strong physiological regulation. We find that plants with deeper Zr* (e.g., evergreen/deciduous broadleaf forest) are mostly distributed in warm or wet regions, and maintain a relatively steady nighttime VOD because of access to deeper water. Taller plants exhibit greater drop in daytime VOD due to their greater physiological vulnerability. While physiological regulation appears to be the dominant water stress regulation strategy at Northern high latitudes where open shrubland and (woody) savannas are distributed, this physiological regulation is coupled with deep rooting in forest and (woody) savanna areas in the tropics, Eastern US, and Southeastern China. Meanwhile, grasslands in the Western US, Central Asia, Northeastern China, and Mongolia Plateau may be the regions most susceptible to water stress impact because neither water stress mitigation strategy is present. This new framework paves the road for a better understanding of plant water stress strategies at the global scale, and for enhancing large-scale drought prediction and drought impact assessment in Earth system models by improving plant water stress response.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7794841

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact