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. 2023 Oct;46(10):3120-3127.
doi: 10.1111/pce.14536. Epub 2023 Jan 15.

Soil-plant hydraulics explain stomatal efficiency-safety tradeoff

Gaochao Cai  1 , Andrea Carminati  2 , Sean M Gleason  3 , Mathieu Javaux  4 , Mutez Ali Ahmed  5   6
Affiliations

Soil-plant hydraulics explain stomatal efficiency-safety tradeoff

Gaochao Cai et al. Plant Cell Environ. 2023 Oct.

Abstract

The efficiency-safety tradeoff has been thoroughly investigated in plants, especially concerning their capacity to transport water and avoid embolism. Stomatal regulation is a vital plant behaviour to respond to soil and atmospheric water limitation. Recently, a stomatal efficiency-safety tradeoff was reported where plants with higher maximum stomatal conductance (gmax ) exhibited greater sensitivity to stomatal closure during soil drying, that is, less negative leaf water potential at 50% gmax (ψgs50 ). However, the underlying mechanism of this gmax -ψgs50 tradeoff remains unknown. Here, we utilized a soil-plant hydraulic model, in which stomatal closure is triggered by nonlinearity in soil-plant hydraulics, to investigate such tradeoff. Our simulations show that increasing gmax is aligned with less negative ψgs50 . Plants with higher gmax (also higher transpiration) require larger quantities of water to be moved across the rhizosphere, which results in a precipitous decrease in water potential at the soil-root interface, and therefore in the leaves. We demonstrated that the gmax -ψgs50 tradeoff can be predicted based on soil-plant hydraulics, and is impacted by plant hydraulic properties, such as plant hydraulic conductance, active root length and embolism resistance. We conclude that plants may therefore adjust their growth and/or their hydraulic properties to adapt to contrasting habitats and climate conditions.

Keywords: leaf water potential; plant hydraulic conductance; stomatal conductance; stomatal regulation; transpiration.

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References

REFERENCES

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