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Tom Pugh

Thomas Pugh

Senior lecturer

Tom Pugh

A Dynamic Model for Strategies and Dynamics of Plant Water-Potential Regulation Under Drought Conditions

Author

  • Phillip Papastefanou
  • Christian S. Zang
  • Thomas A.M. Pugh
  • Daijun Liu
  • Thorsten E.E. Grams
  • Thomas Hickler
  • Anja Rammig

Summary, in English

Vegetation responds to drought through a complex interplay of plant hydraulic mechanisms, posing challenges for model development and parameterization. We present a mathematical model that describes the dynamics of leaf water-potential over time while considering different strategies by which plant species regulate their water-potentials. The model has two parameters: the parameter λ describing the adjustment of the leaf water potential to changes in soil water potential, and the parameter Δψww describing the typical ‘well-watered’ leaf water potentials at non-stressed (near-zero) levels of soil water potential. Our model was tested and calibrated on 110 time-series datasets containing the leaf- and soil water potentials of 66 species under drought and non-drought conditions. Our model successfully reproduces the measured leaf water potentials over time based on three different regulation strategies under drought. We found that three parameter sets derived from the measurement data reproduced the dynamics of 53% of an drought dataset, and 52% of a control dataset [root mean square error (RMSE) < 0.5 MPa)]. We conclude that, instead of quantifying water-potential-regulation of different plant species by complex modeling approaches, a small set of parameters may be sufficient to describe the water potential regulation behavior for large-scale modeling. Thus, our approach paves the way for a parsimonious representation of the full spectrum of plant hydraulic responses to drought in dynamic vegetation models.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system

Publishing year

2020-04-28

Language

English

Publication/Series

Frontiers in Plant Science

Volume

11

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Frontiers Media S. A.

Topic

  • Environmental Sciences

Keywords

  • climate change
  • drought
  • isohydricity
  • leaf water potential
  • plant-hydraulics
  • water stress

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1664-462X