7.3 Conclusion
To mitigate hydraulic damage, many plant species adhere to a strict
coordination between regulation of ΨL and vulnerability
to embolism. For common deciduous tree species growing in temperate
eastern US forests, we found that the extent of ΨLregulation was not linked to vulnerability of xylem embolism.
Specifically, Q. alba, an anisohydric species, possessed xylem
more vulnerable to embolism than the more isohydric L. tulipiferaand A. saccharum . Moreover, this behavior was generally
unaffected by spatio-temporal factors such that coordination among
traits were conserved at the species-level. These findings suggest
species growing in temperate ecosystems have drought-response traits
that are coordinated in a fundamentally different ways than arid climate
vegetation. Ultimately, our understanding of plant-water relations may
be improved by further investigation into mechanisms which allow plants
to tolerate or recover from xylem dysfunction.
8.
Acknowledgements
We thank D. Tyler Roman, Matthew K. Wenzel, Kathryn O. Shay, Mike P.
Voyles, and Daniel C. Ishmael for assistance with data collection.
We acknowledge support from the
USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, US Department of Energy,
through the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Program and the AmeriFlux
Management Project, the National Science Foundation Division of
Environmental Biology (grant DEB-1552747 and
DEB-1637522)
the Integrative Organismal System (IOS-1754893), and the USDA
Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (grant 2017‐67013‐26191 and
2012‐67019‐19484). JDW acknowledges support for the MOFLUX (US-MOz) site
from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of
Biological and Environmental Research Program, through Oak Ridge
National Laboratory’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Science Focus Area; ORNL is
managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. DOE under contract
DE-AC05-00OR22725. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.