How trees use groundwater: a study based on their evolutionary history

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Transpiration dominates terrestrial evapotranspiration, strongly influencing the movement of water, carbon, nutrients, and pollutants in the landscape. Despite evidence for global variations in water uptake strategies across tree species, the models that simulate water and solute movement through soils and ecosystems mostly neglect this complexity. This is in part because we lack empirical studies to parameterize species-level variations in rooting depth in model code. Our research demonstrates via two independent data sets (observed rooting depths and isotopic evidence of groundwater uptake) that rooting depth has greater degrees of similarity in more closely related species than for distantly related species. Overall, our study finds that phylogenetic relationships of trees could provide reasonable estimates of tree groundwater use, improving global-scale ecosystem models in the absence of empirical studies.

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