Low growth resilience to drought is related to future mortality risk in trees.

Lucía DeSoto, Maxime Cailleret, Frank Sterck, Steven Jansen, Koen Kramer, Elisabeth M R Robert, Tuomas Aakala, Mariano M Amoroso, Christof Bigler, J Julio Camarero, Katarina Čufar, Guillermo Gea-Izquierdo, Sten Gillner, Laurel J Haavik, Ana-Maria Hereş, Jeffrey M Kane, Vyacheslav I Kharuk, Thomas Kitzberger, Tamir Klein, Tom Levanič, Juan C Linares, Harri Mäkinen, Walter Oberhuber, Andreas Papadopoulos, Brigitte Rohner, Gabriel Sangüesa-Barreda, Dejan B Stojanovic, Maria Laura Suárez, Ricardo Villalba, Jordi Martínez-Vilalta

Journal: Nature communications 2020;11(1):545

PMID: 31992718

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Abstract

Severe droughts have the potential to reduce forest productivity and trigger tree mortality. Most trees face several drought events during their life and therefore resilience to dry conditions may be crucial to long-term survival. We assessed how growth resilience to severe droughts, including its components resistance and recovery, is related to the ability to survive future droughts by using a tree-ring database of surviving and now-dead trees from 118 sites (22 species, >3,500 trees). We found that, across the variety of regions and species sampled, trees that died during water shortages were less resilient to previous non-lethal droughts, relative to coexisting surviving trees of the same species. In angiosperms, drought-related mortality risk is associated with lower resistance (low capacity to reduce impact of the initial drought), while it is related to reduced recovery (low capacity to attain pre-drought growth rates) in gymnosperms. The different resilience strategies in these two taxonomic groups open new avenues to improve our understanding and prediction of drought-induced mortality.

Address: Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas, Spanish National Research Council (EEZA-CSIC), Almería, Spain. [email protected].; Centre for Functional Ecology, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal. [email protected].; INRAE, Université Aix-Marseille, UMR Recover, Aix-en-Provence, France.; Forest Ecology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), Birmensdorf, Switzerland.; Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.; Institute of Systematic Botany and Ecology, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany.; Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands.; Land Life Company, Amsterdam, Netherlands.; CREAF, Bellaterrra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Catalonia, Spain.; Ecology and Biodiversity, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.; Laboratory of Wood Biology and Xylarium, Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), Tervuren, Belgium.; Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.; Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural (IRNAD), Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Río Negro, Argentina.; Forest Ecology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.; Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología, Spanish National Research Council (IPE-CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain.; Department of Wood Science and Technology, Biotechnical Faculty, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.; Centro de Investigación Forestal (CIFOR), Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA), Madrid, Spain.; Institute of Forest Botany and Forest Zoology, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany.; USDA Forest Service, Missoula, MT, USA.; Department of Forest Sciences, Transilvania University of Brasov, Brasov, Romania.; BC3 - Basque Centre for Climate Change, Leioa, Spain.; Department of Forestry and Wildland Resources, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA, USA.; Sukachev Institute of Forest, Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Krasnoyarsk, Russia.; Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Russia.; Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medio Ambiente (INIBOMA), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Bariloche, Argentina.; Department of Ecology, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Río Negro, Argentina.; Department of Plant & Environmental Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.; Department of Yield and Silviculture, Slovenian Forestry Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.; Department of Physical, Chemical and Natural Systems, Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain.; Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Espoo, Finland.; Department of Botany, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.; Agricultural University of Athens, Karpenissi, Greece.; Forest Ecology, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), Birmensdorf, Switzerland.; EiFAB-iuFOR, University of Valladolid, Soria, Spain.; Institute of Lowland Forestry and Environment, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia.; Grupo Ecología Forestal, CONICET - INTA, EEA Bariloche, Bariloche, Argentina.; Instituto Argentino de Nivología Glaciología y Ciencias Ambientales (IANIGLA-CONICET), Mendoza, Argentina.; CREAF, Bellaterrra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Catalonia, Spain.; Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterrra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Catalonia, Spain.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14300-5

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MeSH Terms: Adaptation, Physiological, Climate Change, Cycadopsida, Droughts, Ecology, Forests, Magnoliopsida, Mortality, Soil, Species Specificity, Stress, Physiological, Survival Analysis, Trees, Water