6 October 2025
Florence Volaire, Sean M Gleason, Andrea Carminati, Robert Griffin-Nolan, Maurizio Mencuccini, Karim Barkaoui, Sandra Bucci, Marc Carriquí, Aude Coupel-Ledru, Louise Comas, Alistair Leverett, Rose Marks, Jordi Martinez-Vilalta, Lucy Rowland, Jared J Stewart, Vincent Vadez - Authorea, 2025
A framework of traits and strategies for drought adaptation is critical for predicting and managing the effects of a changing climate on natural and cultivated plant communities.
The ‘growth potential – stress survival’ tradeoff underpins plant ecological strategies, but lacks a time dimension incorporating the timing and duration of drought, both crucial to plant adaptation. Along three successive phases of decreasing water availability, extensive or intensive pattern/process traits, involved in growth potential (phase I), growth/turgor
55 maintenance (phase II) and survival (phase III) play different roles in drought resistance or survival. Across life forms, critical values of traits converge in phases I-II, but differ according to survival strategies during phase III.
Modelling water use for annuals, perennials, resurrection and succulent species, shows a tradeoff between water use in phases I-II and phase III duration, i.e. between water acquisition vs conservation associated with water storage capacity or dehydration/desiccation tolerance. This trade-off underpins the framework of plant water use economics among and within species. With growth potential and growth/turgor maintenance under drought trading-off with survival and resilience to severe drought, incorporating timescales in efforts for measuring traits, modelling and breeding for drought adaptation will be key to future progress.
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