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Reply to: Disentangling biology from mathematical necessity in twentieth-century gymnosperm resilience trends

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 736–737 (2021)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 05 April 2021

replying to T. Zheng et al. Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01436-w (2021)

We used a global data set of tree rings to demonstrate an increase in resilience (post-drought recovery rate) and a decrease in drought resistance (sensitivity to drought) for gymnosperms over 1950–2009 driven by plant ecophysiological adaptation to increasing drought. Zheng et al. confirmed our key finding using the same resilience metric, but they argued that our finding would not hold using a different resilience metric. We show that the alternative resilience metric Zheng et al. proposed to use does not include information about different declines in growth rate induced by drought and thus cannot be used for comparing the recovery of tree growth for a large range of drought severity across space and over time. Their metric hence does not fit the purpose of our original study, which aimed to understand the change and adaptation of plant ecophysiological traits under drought.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of the decline in tree growth during drought and its post-drought recovery.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 41988101).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xiangyi Li, Shilong Piao, Kai Wang, Xuhui Wang, Xu Lian & Shushi Peng

  2. Key Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Center for Excellence in Tibetan Earth Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Shilong Piao & Tao Wang

  3. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA CNRS UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

  4. Department of Biology and Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Anping Chen

  5. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CSIC-UAB, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

  6. CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

Authors
  1. Xiangyi Li
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  2. Shilong Piao
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  5. Tao Wang
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  7. Anping Chen
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  8. Xu Lian
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  9. Shushi Peng
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  10. Josep Peñuelas
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Contributions

S. Piao, X. Li and A.C. wrote the first draft of the reply with help from P.C., J.P., K.W., X.W., T.W., X. Lian and S. Peng; X. Li created the figure; P.C., J.P., K.W., X.W., T.W., X. Lian and S. Peng contributed to the revision of the reply.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shilong Piao.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Nate Mcdowell and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Li, X., Piao, S., Wang, K. et al. Reply to: Disentangling biology from mathematical necessity in twentieth-century gymnosperm resilience trends. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 736–737 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01412-4

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