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Convergence in water use efficiency within plant functional types across contrasting climates

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Abstract

Water use efficiency (WUE) provides a direct measure of the inextricable link between plant carbon uptake and water loss, and it can be used to study how ecosystem function varies with climate. We analysed WUE data from the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), leveraging the high spatial resolution of ECOSTRESS to study the distribution of WUE values both within and among regions with different plant functional types. Our results indicate that despite wide local variability of WUE estimates, WUE tended to converge to common global optima (peaked distributions with variance <0.5 g C per kg H2O, kurtosis >3.0) for five of nine plant functional types (grassland, permanent wetland, savannah, deciduous broadleaf and deciduous needleleaf forest), and this convergence occurred in functional types that spanned distinct geographic regions and climates.

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Fig. 1: Insight into ecosystem WUE from ECOSTRESS.
Fig. 2: Convergence in WUE within PFTs across contrasting climates.

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Data availability

All data used in this study are publicly available on the NASA/USGS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center. The data can be spatially and temporally subset and retrieved via the Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS) at https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/tools/appeears/.

Code availability

All code used in this study is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Sikka, W. Assunção, G. Halverson, L. Sanchez and D. Menge for their assistance, as well as the Menge Laboratory. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Government sponsorship acknowledged. Support was provided by the ECOSTRESS mission (S.S.C. and J.B.F.) and by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science grant no. 80NSSC20K0216 (G.R.G.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Savannah S. Cooley

  2. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Savannah S. Cooley

  3. Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA

    Joshua B. Fisher & Gregory R. Goldsmith

Authors
  1. Savannah S. Cooley
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  2. Joshua B. Fisher
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  3. Gregory R. Goldsmith
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Contributions

All authors performed the literature review. J.B.F. first conceptualized the study. All authors contributed to designing the methodology. S.S.C. conducted all data analysis, performed all statistical tests and generated the figures. All authors wrote and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Joshua B. Fisher.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Plants thanks Andrew Feldman, Alienor Lavergne and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Discussion Sections 1–9, Tables 1–6, Figs. 1–4 and references.

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Cooley, S.S., Fisher, J.B. & Goldsmith, G.R. Convergence in water use efficiency within plant functional types across contrasting climates. Nat. Plants 8, 341–345 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01131-z

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