Plant resistance to drought depends on timely stomatal closure.

By N. Martin-StPaul, Sylvain Delzon, H. Cochard. Ecology Letters, 2017

660 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stomata play a significant role in the Earth's water and carbon cycles, by regulating gaseous exchanges between the plant and the atmosphere. Under drought conditions, stomatal control of transpiration has long been thought to be closely coordinated with the decrease in hydraulic capacity (hydraulic failure due to xylem embolism). We tested this hypothesis by coupling a meta-analysis of functional traits related to the stomatal response to drought and embolism resistance with simulations from a soil-plant hydraulic model. We report here a previously unreported phenomenon: the existence of an absolute limit by which stomata closure must occur to avoid rapid death in drought conditions. The water potential causing stomatal closure and the xylem pressure at the onset of embolism formation were equal for only a small number of species, and the difference between these two traits (i.e. safety margins) increased continuously with increasing embolism resistance. Our findings demonstrate the need to revise current views about the functional coordination between stomata and hydraulic traits and provide a mechanistic framework for modeling plant mortality under drought conditions.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6175fe10a0ea1b0780023d5c50ee3446c0478f62

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Citations in the corpus

Combined Application of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi and Exogenous Melatonin Alleviates Drought Stress and Improves Plant Growth in Tobacco Seedlings (2020, background): “Drought is an abiotic stress that has a drastic effect on the growth and development of plants, especially at the seedling stage; drought at the seedling stage has been identified as the trigger for widespread plant mortality events around the world (Carnicer et al. 2011; Martin-StPaul et al. 2017; ”
Abscisic acid dynamics, signaling and functions in plants. (2019, background): “ABA-INDUCED STOMATAL CLOSURE Stomata is pivotal for gas exchange and transpiration of plants, and the closure of it can be induced by numerous environmental factors such as drought, pathogen attack, dark, low humidity, high CO2 concentrations and so on (Bauer et al. 2013; Assmann and Jegla 2016; Mar”