Root Foraging Alters Global Patterns of Ecosystem Legacy From Climate Perturbations

Berkelhammer, Max; Drewniak, Beth; Ahlswede, B.; Gonzàlez-Meler, Miquel A.

doi:10.1029/2021jg006612

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…Furthermore, during a drought, or drought recovery (Hikino et al ., 2022), the proportion of carbon allocated belowground also tends to increase (Zhang et al ., 2019; Brunn et al ., 2022) together with rooting depth in some cases; in a long‐term drought experiment in Queensland, rainforest trees increased average rooting depth (Pivovaroff et al ., 2021). Overall, greater root dry matter per unit leaf area (Potkay et al ., 2021) may help maintain water supply, but greater belowground allocation may also limit the potential for aboveground traits to respond to drought (Zhou et al ., 2020; Agee et al ., 2021; Pagay et al ., 2022), while increases in rooting depth could be maladaptive under nondrought conditions if nutrient uptake is reduced (Berkelhammer et al ., 2022).…”

Section: Summarising Plasticity In Key Traits In Response To Droughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

How woody plants adjust above‐ and below‐ground traits in response to sustained drought

et al. 2023

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Summary Future increases in drought severity and frequency are predicted to have substantial impacts on plant function and survival. However, there is considerable uncertainty concerning what drought adjustment is and whether plants can adjust to sustained drought. This review focuses on woody plants and synthesises the evidence for drought adjustment in a selection of key above‐ground and below‐ground plant traits. We assess whether evaluating the drought adjustment of single traits, or selections of traits that operate on the same plant functional axis (e.g. photosynthetic traits) is sufficient, or whether a multi‐trait approach, integrating across multiple axes, is required. We conclude that studies on drought adjustments in woody plants might overestimate the capacity for adjustment to drier environments if spatial studies along gradients are used, without complementary experimental approaches. We provide evidence that drought adjustment is common in above‐ground and below‐ground traits; however, whether this is adaptive and sufficient to respond to future droughts remains uncertain for most species. To address this uncertainty, we must move towards studying trait integration within and across multiple axes of plant function (e.g. above‐ground and below‐ground) to gain a holistic view of drought adjustments at the whole‐plant scale and how these influence plant survival.

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Section: Summarising Plasticity In Key Traits In Response To Droughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

How woody plants adjust above‐ and below‐ground traits in response to sustained drought

et al. 2023

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“…New approaches to move beyond plant functional types to detailed species and land use delineations were found to be important for air quality modeling (Luttkus et al, 2022), biogenic volatile organic compound crop emission models (Havermann et al, 2022), and for site-level data assimilation in ecosystem models (Jung & Hararuk, 2022). A particularly novel advance by Berkelhammer et al (2022) involved incorporating the multidimensional scale of root foraging for water and nutrients in space and time across the soil continuum, a process whose inclusion improves simulations of plant drought recovery.…”

Section: Scaling a Mountainmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A particularly novel advance by Berkelhammer et al. (2022) involved incorporating the multidimensional scale of root foraging for water and nutrients in space and time across the soil continuum, a process whose inclusion improves simulations of plant drought recovery.…”

Section: Scaling a Mountainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scaling Land‐Atmosphere Interactions: Special or Fundamental?

et al. 2022

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Viewed from billions of kilometers away in space, Earth appears as a single "Pale Blue Dot," in the immortalized phrase of Carl Sagan bestowed upon the image taken by the Voyager 1 space probe. Coming closer, though, a sharper image emerges (Figure 1).One finds structure to that dot, shades of green and brown continents, a dark ocean, a bright cryosphere, and a hazy, thin blue atmosphere. Zooming further in, those components break into patterns of mountains and rivers, seas and bays, forests and grasslands, layers, and cloud decks. And getting closer, one finds each component has oscillations and variations of branches and rivulets, canyons and plateaus, currents and coastlines. These objects keep revealing more structure in finer, often self-similar form, like Mandelbrot's fractals, down to eddies and organisms, and further into leaves, cells, enzymes, molecules, and atoms.And then, if you wait seconds, days, decades, or eons, landscape patterns change. Bigger things typically take longer than smaller ones. As a result, the pattern changes-sometimes occurring slowly and subtly, ebbing and flowing in an oscillatory manner, or they can occur quickly and abruptly, morphing into a new state of order.Each element and its dynamics come with variations in space and time that can be encompassed by the concept of scale. Earth systems science is preoccupied with the interactions of these elements, which cannot be understood without a stipulation of the scales of interest (Ge et al., 2019). The most straightforward of these interactions are ones where common processes at all scales can be defined by a single relationship, often a power-law, leading to the concept of scale invariance (Paleri et al., 2022). The most interesting interactions are the ones that break those rules and lead to "upscale" and "downscale" behavior, whereby processes at one scale determine the shape and function of another scale. These are most common at the intersections of biology, hydrology, geology, and meteorology, often within what is termed the "critical zone." This interlocking also harkens to the origins of

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“…To understand the source of water within the extracted xylem pool, we utilized additional information on meteoric water inputs to the system. We took advantage of a wide range of isotopic data from this watershed on groundwater, precipitation and snowpack samples which have previously been presented (Berkelhammer et al, 2022;Carroll et al, 2022a soil water samples are subject to evaporative enrichment relative to the precipitation inputs, leading to higher values of δ 18 O and δ 2 H as well as a shallower slope between the two isotopes relative to meteoric inputs. To estimate the sources of water in stems and soils, the measurements need to be projected back to the meteoric water line.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hereafter, we refer to the stem water as the estimated isotopic ratio of the source water value following all corrections based on the aforementioned effects. Raw isotopic data are provided in the dataset associated with this publication (Berkelhammer et al, 2022).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Canopy structure modulates the sensitivity of subalpine forest stands to interannual snowpack and precipitation variability

Berkelhammer,

Page,

Zurek

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Abstract. Declining spring snowpack is expected to have widespread effects on montane and subalpine forests in western North America and across the globe. However, the effect of this forcing at the species and hillslope scale are difficult to predict from remote sensing or eddy covariance. Here, we present data from a network of sap velocity sensors and xylem water isotope measurements from three common subalpine tree species (Picea engelmannii, Abies lasiocarpa, Populus tremuloides) across a hillslope transect in a subalpine watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin. We use these data to compare tree- and stand-level responses to the historically high spring snowpack but low summer rainfall of 2019 against the low spring snowpacks but high summer rains of 2021 and 2022. From the sap velocity data, we found that only 40 % of the trees showed an increase in cumulative transpiration in response to the large snowpack year (2019), illustrating the absence of a common response to a major decline in snowpack. The trees that benefited from the large snow year were all found in dense canopy stands – irrespective of species – while trees in open canopy stands were more active during the years with modest snow and higher summer rains. This pattern reflects how persistent access to soil moisture recharged by snowmelt in topographically-mediated convergence zones shapes stand density. These locally dense canopies also experience high levels of summer rainfall interception that reduce summer precipitation inputs to the soil perpetuating their greater sensitivity to snowmelt inputs. The results illustrate that the progression towards a low snowpack future will manifest at the sub-hillslope scale in dense stands with significant rainfall interception and high water demands reflecting their historical reliance on snowmelt water.

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Root Foraging Alters Global Patterns of Ecosystem Legacy From Climate Perturbations

Cited by 4 publications

References 87 publications

How woody plants adjust above‐ and below‐ground traits in response to sustained drought

How woody plants adjust above‐ and below‐ground traits in response to sustained drought

Scaling Land‐Atmosphere Interactions: Special or Fundamental?

Canopy structure modulates the sensitivity of subalpine forest stands to interannual snowpack and precipitation variability

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