Ecological and Hydroclimatic Determinants of Vegetation Water-Use Strategies

Vegetation responses to soil moisture limitation play a key role in land-atmosphere interactions and are a major source of uncertainty in future projections of the global water and carbon cycles. Plant water-use strategies–i.e., regulation of transpiration rates as the soil dries–are highly dynamic across space and over time, which presents a major challenge to developing scalable inferences about ecosystem responses to water limitation. Here, we use a global database of in-situ soil moisture measurements to characterize ecosystem-specific water-use strategies based on the degree of nonlinearity in soil moisture drydown curves. We introduce a novel nonlinearity parameter to classify water-use strategies along a spectrum of aggressive to conservative responses to water limitation. Our findings reveal that, when aggregated globally, water-use strategies derived from point-based soil moisture observations exhibit emergent patterns across and within climates and vegetation types. Water use becomes more conservative as mean annual precipitation increases and as woody cover increases from grasslands to savannas to forests. We embed this empirical synthesis within an ecohydrological framework to show that key ecological (leaf area) and hydroclimatic (aridity) factors driving competition for water explain up to 77% of the variance in water-use strategies within ecosystem types. All biomes respond to ecological and hydroclimatic competition by shifting toward more aggressive water-use strategies. However, woodlands reach a threshold beyond which water use becomes increasingly conservative, reflecting the greater hydraulic risk involved in sustaining high transpiration rates under water limitation for trees than grasses. These findings highlight the importance of characterizing the dynamical nature of vegetation water-use strategies to improve predictions of ecosystem responses to climate change.