Abstract
Plants make leaf-level trade-offs between photosynthetic carbon assimilation and water loss, and the optimal balance between the two is dependent, in part, on water availability. “Conservative” water-use strategies, in which minimizing water loss is prioritized over assimilating carbon, tend to be favored in arid environments, while “aggressive” water-use strategies, in which carbon assimilation is prioritized over water conservation, are often favored in mesic environments. When derived from foliar carbon isotope ratios, intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) serves as a seasonally integrated indicator of the balance of carbon assimilation to water loss at the leaf level. Here, we used a multi-decadal record of annual iWUE, growth, and flowering from a single population of Encelia farinosa in the Mojave Desert to evaluate the effect of iWUE on plant performance across interannual fluctuations in water availability. We identified substantial variability in iWUE among individuals and found that iWUE interacted with water availability to significantly influence growth and flowering. However, the relationships between iWUE, water availability, and plant performance did not universally suggest that “conservative” water-use strategies were advantageous in dry years or that “aggressive” strategies were advantageous in wet years. iWUE was positively related to the odds of growth regardless of water availability and to the odds of flowering in dry years, but negatively related to growth rates in dry years. In addition, we found that leaf nitrogen content affected interannual plant performance and that an individual’s iWUE plasticity in response to fluctuations in aridity was negatively related to early life drought survival and growth.
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Acknowledgements
This contribution is dedicated to Professor Russ Monson, a pioneer in plant ecophysiology whose early career focused on desert plants. We are honored to submit this manuscript as part of the Special Issue highlighting Professor Monson’s career. We would like to thank Darren Sandquist and the numerous individuals that have assisted with data collection during annual field surveys. We thank the Stable Isotope Ratio Facility for Environmental Research (SIRFER) at the University of Utah for conducting isotope analyses. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant DEB-1950025.
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JRE conceived, designed, and conducted the study, AWD and NQB analyzed the data, AWD wrote the initial draft of the manuscript, and all authors contributed to subsequent versions.
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Communicated by Amy Marie Trowbridge.
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Driscoll, A.W., Bitter, N.Q. & Ehleringer, J.R. Interactions among intrinsic water-use efficiency and climate influence growth and flowering in a common desert shrub. Oecologia 197, 1027–1038 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04825-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04825-3