ArticleThe New phytologist2021
Hydraulically-vulnerable trees survive on deep-water access during droughts in a tropical forest.
Article in The New phytologist, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 124 citations in OpenAlex.
- Regulation of Transpiration and Whole-Tree Crown Conductance in Tropical Forests.Plant, cell & environment · 2026Article
- Mechanisms and scales in modeling forest responses to changing disturbance regimes.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Impact of emerging compound droughts on forests: A water supply and demand perspective.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Review
- Drying suppresses fine root production to 1 m depths and alters root traits in four distinct tropical forests.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Drought Response Is Not a Species Trait: Tropical Tree Drought Sensitivity Is Shaped by Drought Characteristics, Species Adaptations and Individual Microenvironments.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Red maple tree root water uptake depths are influenced by neighboring tree species composition.Tree physiology · 2025Article
- High Inter-Specific Diversity and Seasonality of Trunk Radial Growth in Trees Along an Afrotropical Elevational Gradient.Plant, cell & environment · 2025Article
- Mortality correlates with tree functional traits across a wood density gradient in the Central Amazon.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Anatomical traits explain drought response of seedlings from wet tropical forests.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Responses of stem growth and canopy greenness of temperate conifers to dry spells.International journal of biometeorology · 2024Article
- Key hydraulic traits control the dynamics of plant dehydration in four contrasting tree species during drought.Tree physiology · 2023Article
- Deep roots mitigate drought impacts on tropical trees despite limited quantitative contribution to transpiration.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Is a seasonally reduced growth potential a convergent strategy to survive drought and frost in plants?Annals of botany · 2023Review
- Amazon drought resilience - emerging results point to new empirical needs.The New phytologist · 2023Article
- Variations in the plasticity of functional traits indicate the differential impacts of abiotic and biotic factors on the structure and growth of trees in tropical dry forest fragments.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Global patterns of water storage in the rooting zones of vegetation.Nature geoscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Dry Season Transpiration and Soil Water Dynamics in the Central Amazon.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Strategies of tree species to adapt to drought from leaf stomatal regulation and stem embolism resistance to root properties.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Review
- Large differences in leaf cuticle conductance and its temperature response among 24 tropical tree species from across a rainfall gradient.The New phytologist · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
25 authors at 9 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Deep-water access is arguably the most effective, but under-studied, mechanism that plants employ to survive during drought. Vulnerability to embolism and hydraulic safety margins can predict mortality risk at given levels of dehydration, but deep-water access may delay plant dehydration. Here, we tested the role of deep-water access in enabling survival within a diverse tropical forest community in Panama using a novel data-model approach. We inversely estimated the effective rooting depth (ERD, as the average depth of water extraction), for 29 canopy species by linking diameter growth dynamics (1990-2015) to vapor pressure deficit, water potentials in the whole-soil column, and leaf hydraulic vulnerability curves. We validated ERD estimates against existing isotopic data of potential water-access depths. Across species, deeper ERD was associated with higher maximum stem hydraulic conductivity, greater vulnerability to xylem embolism, narrower safety margins, and lower mortality rates during extreme droughts over 35 years (1981-2015) among evergreen species. Species exposure to water stress declined with deeper ERD indicating that trees compensate for water stress-related mortality risk through deep-water access. The role of deep-water access in mitigating mortality of hydraulically-vulnerable trees has important implications for our predictive understanding of forest dynamics under current and future climates.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.