Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://doi.org/bst5 (2016)
With many regions of the world expected to experience increasing drought, meaningful predictions of species and ecosystem responses to climate change are contingent on understanding of drought tolerance. Plants' drought tolerance is determined by many interacting physiological traits but general patterns of these plant-trait relationships have, perhaps surprisingly, not yet been assessed.
Megan Bartlett from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and co-workers address exactly this question. Using meta-analysis methods they synthesize published data for stomatal, hydraulic, and leaf tissue drought tolerance traits for 310 species from ecosystems worldwide. They find that most traits are correlated across species, and these associations are largely driven by co-selection with environmental water stress.
These findings lay the groundwork needed to improve representation of variation in multiple traits in dynamic global vegetation models used to simulate plant responses to drought and the associated ecological and biogeochemical implications.
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Brown, A. Responses to drought. Nature Clim Change 6, 1060 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3174
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3174
