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Trait velocities reveal that mortality has driven widespread coordinated shifts in forest hydraulic trait composition

A. Trugman,L. Anderegg,J. Shaw,W. Anderegg

Published 2020 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ABSTRACT

Significance Tree hydraulic traits determine plant water use and tree vulnerability to drought stress thereby affecting forest productivity and the movement of water between the land surface and the atmosphere. Here, we leverage an extensive trait database and a long-term continental forest plot network to map changes in the hydraulic traits of tree communities across the United States. We find evidence for shifts toward communities with more drought-tolerant traits driven by tree mortality. This trait compositional change may buffer forest productivity and water fluxes in the near term from the effects of climate change. Understanding the driving mechanisms behind existing patterns of vegetation hydraulic traits and community trait diversity is critical for advancing predictions of the terrestrial carbon cycle because hydraulic traits affect both ecosystem and Earth system responses to changing water availability. Here, we leverage an extensive trait database and a long-term continental forest plot network to map changes in community trait distributions and quantify “trait velocities” (the rate of change in community-weighted traits) for different regions and different forest types across the United States from 2000 to the present. We show that diversity in hydraulic traits and photosynthetic characteristics is more related to local water availability than overall species diversity. Finally, we find evidence for coordinated shifts toward communities with more drought-tolerant traits driven by tree mortality, but the magnitude of responses differs depending on forest type. The hydraulic trait distribution maps provide a publicly available platform to fundamentally advance understanding of community trait change in response to climate change and predictive abilities of mechanistic vegetation models.

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