Deadly predictions in trees

This scientific commentary refers to ‘Coordinated hydraulic traits influence the two phases of time to hydraulic failure in five temperate tree species differing in stomatal stringency’ by Waite et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpae038).

The connection between modern climatic heating and tree mortality creates urgent motivation to understand tree death and to predict which forests will survive and which will collapse in the next decades. Great progress has been made in terms of identifying the primary mechanisms of drought-induced tree mortality, especially in terms of xylem system failure (Brodribb and Cochard, 2009, Choat et al. 2018, Brodribb et al. 2020), but translating this physiological understanding to a quantitative prediction of species survival time under drought in forest is proving complicated (Trugman et al. 2021). A recent paper by Waite et al. (2024) provides important insights into applying this understanding to quantify time to death across different species during drought.