Confronting the water potential information gap.

Autor: Novick KA; O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University - Bloomington. Bloomington, IN USA., Ficklin DL; Department of Geography, Indiana University - Bloomington. Bloomington, IN USA., Baldocchi D; Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA, USA., Davis KJ; Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA., Ghezzehei TA; Life and Environmental Sciences Department, University of California - Merced. Merced, CA, USA., Konings AG; Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University. Stanford, CA, USA., MacBean N; Department of Geography, Indiana University - Bloomington. Bloomington, IN USA., Raoult N; Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement. Paris, France., Scott RL; Southwest Watershed Research Center, USDA - Agricultural Research Service. Tucson, AZ, USA., Shi Y; Department of Plant Science. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA., Sulman BN; Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Oak Ridge, TN, USA., Wood JD; School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Nature geoscience [Nat Geosci] 2022 Mar; Vol. 15 (3), pp. 158-164. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Mar 11.
DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-00909-2
Abstrakt: Water potential directly controls the function of leaves, roots, and microbes, and gradients in water potential drive water flows throughout the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Notwithstanding its clear relevance for many ecosystem processes, soil water potential is rarely measured in-situ, and plant water potential observations are generally discrete, sparse, and not yet aggregated into accessible databases. These gaps limit our conceptual understanding of biophysical responses to moisture stress and inject large uncertainty into hydrologic and land surface models. Here, we outline the conceptual and predictive gains that could be made with more continuous and discoverable observations of water potential in soils and plants. We discuss improvements to sensor technologies that facilitate in situ characterization of water potential, as well as strategies for building new networks that aggregate water potential data across sites. We end by highlighting novel opportunities for linking more representative site-level observations of water potential to remotely-sensed proxies. Together, these considerations offer a roadmap for clearer links between ecohydrological processes and the water potential gradients that have the 'potential' to substantially reduce conceptual and modeling uncertainties.
Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
Databáze: MEDLINE
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