It is suggested that, similar to the manifold that tree species leaf traits cluster around the 'leaf economics spectrum', a similar 'wood economics spectrum' may be defined.
It is shown that 70% of 226 forest species from 81 sites worldwide operate with narrow hydraulic safety margins against injurious levels of drought stress and therefore potentially face long-term reductions in productivity and survival if temperature and aridity increase as predicted for many regions across the globe.
The improved availability of plant trait data in the unified global database is expected to support a paradigm shift from species to trait-based ecology, offer new opportunities for synthetic plant trait research and enable a more realistic and empirically grounded representation of terrestrial vegetation in Earth system models.
Cavitation resistance and hydraulic conductivity in Acer appear to be controlled by a very complex interaction between tissue, vessel network and pit characteristics, with a 2 MPa range in species' mean cavitation pressure.
The data suggest that SEM images of intact pit membranes underestimate the porosity of pit membranes in situ, and pit membrane porosity based on SEM offers a relative estimate of air-seeding thresholds, but absolute pore diameters must be treated with caution.
The impact of variation in pit structure on water transport in plants from the level of individual pits to the whole plant is addressed, indicating that pits are an important factor in the overall hydraulic efficiency of plants.
A panorama of the techniques used to generate a 'vulnerability curve' (VC) shows the variation of the percentage of cavitation as a function of xylem pressure potential, and it was found that the vast majority of curves obtained with the reference bench dehydration-PLC method are 'sigmoidal'.
The preliminary conclusions support the primitive status of aluminum hyperaccumulation, which provides an evolutionary model system for the integration of different biological disciplines, such as systematics, ecology, biogeography, physiology, and biochemistry.
The correlations among the drought tolerance traits across species provide a framework for predicting plant responses to a wide range of water stress from one or two sampled traits, increasing the ability to rapidly characterize drought tolerance across diverse species.