articleNature CommunicationsJan 28, 2020GOLD OA

Low growth resilience to drought is related to future mortality risk in trees

LDLucía DeSotoMCMaxime CailleretFJFrank J. SterckSJSteven JansenKKK. Krämer

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas · Estacion Experimental de Zonas Aridas · +35 more institutions

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Abstract

Severe droughts have the potential to reduce forest productivity and trigger tree mortality. Most trees face several drought events during their life and therefore resilience to dry conditions may be crucial to long-term survival. We assessed how growth resilience to severe droughts, including its components resistance and recovery, is related to the ability to survive future droughts by using a tree-ring database of surviving and now-dead trees from 118 sites (22 species, >3,500 trees). We found that, across the variety of regions and species sampled, trees that died during water shortages were less resilient to previous non-lethal droughts, relative to coexisting surviving trees of the same species. In…

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Topics & keywords

Topics
Keywords
  • Resilience (materials science)
  • Resistance (ecology)
  • Economic shortage
  • Psychological resilience
  • Drought resistance
  • Biology
  • Drought stress
  • Drought tolerance
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