Testing the plant pneumatic method to estimate xylem embolism resistance in stems of temperate trees

Archive ouverte

Zhang, Ya | Lamarque, Laurent J. | Torres Ruiz, Jose Manuel | Schuldt, Bernhard | Karimi, Zohreh | Li, Shan | Qin, De-Wen | Bittencourt, Paulo | Burlett, Régis | Cao, Kun-Fang | Delzon, Sylvain | Oliveira, Rafael | Pereira, Luciano | Jansen, Steven

Edité par CCSD ; Oxford University Press (OUP) -

International audience. Methods to estimate xylem embolism resistance generally rely on hydraulic measurements, which can be far from straightforward. Recently, a pneumatic method based on air flow measurements of terminal branch ends was proposed to construct vulnerability curves by linking the amount of air extracted from a branch with the degree of embolism. We applied this novel technique for 10 temperate tree species, including six diffuse, two ring-porous and two gymnosperm species, and compared the pneumatic curves with hydraulic ones obtained from either the flow-centrifuge or the hydraulic-bench dehydration method. We found that the pneumatic method provides a good estimate of the degree of xylem embolism for all angiosperm species. The xylem pressure at 50% and 88% loss of hydraulic conductivity (i.e., Ψ50 and Ψ88) based on the methods applied showed a strongly significant correlation for all eight angiosperms. However, the pneumatic method showed significantly reduced Ψ50 values for the two conifers. Our findings suggest that the pneumatic method could provide a fast and accurate approach for angiosperms due to its convenience and feasibility, at least within the range of embolism resistances covered by our samples.

• Description
• Sujet/Public
• Outil
• Outil d'anticipation
• Mémoire et thèse
• Gestion