Abstract
Water use efficiency (WUE) provides a direct measure of the inextricable link between plant carbon uptake and water loss, and it can be used to study how ecosystem function varies with climate. We analysed WUE data from the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS), leveraging the high spatial resolution of ECOSTRESS to study the distribution of WUE values both within and among regions with different plant functional types. Our results indicate that despite wide local variability of WUE estimates, WUE tended to converge to common global optima (peaked distributions with variance <0.5 g C per kg H2O, kurtosis >3.0) for five of nine plant functional types (grassland, permanent wetland, savannah, deciduous broadleaf and deciduous needleleaf forest), and this convergence occurred in functional types that spanned distinct geographic regions and climates.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
All data used in this study are publicly available on the NASA/USGS Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center. The data can be spatially and temporally subset and retrieved via the Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS) at https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/tools/appeears/.
Code availability
All code used in this study is available upon request.
References
Arneth, A. et al. Terrestrial biogeochemical feedbacks in the climate system. Nat. Geosci. 3, 525–532 (2010).
Green, J. K. et al. Regionally strong feedbacks between the atmosphere and terrestrial biosphere. Nat. Geosci. 10, 410–414 (2017).
Heimann, M. & Reichstein, M. Terrestrial ecosystem carbon dynamics and climate feedbacks. Nature 451, 289–292 (2008).
Beer, C. et al. Temporal and among-site variability of inherent water use efficiency at the ecosystem level. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 23, 1–13 (2009).
Keenan, T. F. et al. Increase in forest water-use efficiency as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise. Nature 499, 324–327 (2013).
Frank, D. C. et al. Water-use efficiency & transpiration across European forests during the Anthropocene. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 579–583 (2015).
Mastrotheodoros, T. et al. Linking plant functional trait plasticity and the large increase in forest water use efficiency. J. Geophys. Res. Biogeosci. 122, 2393–2408 (2017).
Lavergne, A. et al. Observed and modelled historical trends in the water-use efficiency of plants and ecosystems. Glob. Change Biol. 25, 2242–2257 (2019).
Huxman, T. E. et al. Convergence across biomes to a common rain-use efficiency. Nature 429, 651–654 (2004).
Yang, Y. et al. Contrasting responses of water use efficiency to drought across global terrestrial ecosystems. Sci. Rep. 6, 23284 (2016).
Huang, L. et al. A global examination of the response of ecosystem water-use efficiency to drought based on MODIS data. Sci. Total Environ. 601–602, 1097–1107 (2017).
Reichstein, M. et al. Severe drought effects on ecosystem CO2 and H2O fluxes at three Mediterranean evergreen sites: revision of current hypotheses? Glob. Change Biol. 8, 999–1017 (2002).
Reichstein, M. et al. Inverse modeling of seasonal drought effects on canopy CO2/H2O exchange in three Mediterranean ecosystems. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 108, 4726 (2003).
Cooley, S. S. et al. Assessing regional drought impacts on vegetation and evapotranspiration: a case study in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Ecol. Appl. 29, e01834 (2019).
Medrano, H., Flexas, J. & Galmés, J. Variability in water use efficiency at the leaf level among Mediterranean plants with different growth forms. Plant Soil 317, 17–29 (2008).
Soh, W. K. et al. Rising CO2 drives divergence in water use efficiency of evergreen and deciduous plants. Sci. Adv. 5, eaax7906 (2019).
Wang, M., Chen, Y., Wu, X. & Bai, Y. Forest-type-dependent water use efficiency trends across the northern hemisphere. Geophys. Res. Lett. 45, 8283–8293 (2018).
Enquist, B. et al. Scaling from traits to ecosystems: developing a general trait driver theory via integrating trait-based and metabolic scaling theories. Adv. Ecol. Res. 52, 249–318 (2015).
Gross, N. et al. Functional trait diversity maximizes ecosystem multifunctionality. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 1, 0132 (2017).
Bagousse‐Pinguet, Y. L. et al. Testing the environmental filtering concept in global drylands. J. Ecol. 105, 1058–1069 (2017).
Ponce Campos, G. E. et al. Ecosystem resilience despite large-scale altered hydroclimatic conditions. Nature 494, 349–352 (2013).
Fisher, J. B. et al. The future of evapotranspiration: global requirements for ecosystem functioning, carbon and climate feedbacks, agricultural management, and water resources. Water Resour. Res. 53, 2618–2626 (2017).
Xue, B.-L. et al. Global patterns, trends, and drivers of water use efficiency from 2000 to 2013. Ecosphere 6, art174 (2015).
Fisher, J. B. et al. ECOSTRESS: NASA’s next generation mission to measure evapotranspiration from the International Space Station. Water Resour. Res. 56, e2019WR026058 (2020).
Higgins, M. A. et al. Geological control of floristic composition in Amazonian forests. J. Biogeogr. 38, 2136–2149 (2011).
De Kauwe, M. G., Keenan, T. F., Medlyn, B. E., Prentice, I. C. & Terrer, C. Satellite based estimates underestimate the effect of CO2 fertilization on net primary productivity. Nat. Clim. Change 6, 892–893 (2016).
Huang, M. et al. Seasonal responses of terrestrial ecosystem water-use efficiency to climate change. Glob. Change Biol. 22, 2165–2177 (2016).
Lin, Y.-S. et al. Optimal stomatal behaviour around the world. Nat. Clim. Change 5, 459–464 (2015).
Medlyn, B. E. et al. Reconciling the optimal and empirical approaches to modelling stomatal conductance. Glob. Change Biol. 17, 2134–2144 (2011).
Peters, W. et al. Increased water-use efficiency and reduced CO2 uptake by plants during droughts at a continental scale. Nat. Geosci. 11, 744–748 (2018).
Cheng, L. et al. Recent increases in terrestrial carbon uptake at little cost to the water cycle. Nat. Commun. 8, 110 (2017).
Fisher, J. B. ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS): Level-3 Evapotranspiration L3(ET_PT-JPL) Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (2018).
Running, S. W. et al. A continuous satellite-derived measure of global terrestrial primary production. BioScience 54, 547–560 (2004).
Heinsch, F. et al. Evaluation of remote sensing based terrestrial productivity from MODIS using regional tower eddy flux network observations. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens. 44, 1908–1925 (2006).
Zhao, M., Heinsch, F., Nemani, R. & Running, S. Improvements of the MODIS terrestrial gross and net primary production global data set. Remote Sens. Environ. 95, 164–176 (2005).
Ryu, Y. et al. Integration of MODIS land and atmosphere products with a coupled-process model to estimate gross primary productivity and evapotranspiration from 1 km to global scales. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 25, GB4017 (2011).
Acknowledgements
We thank M. Sikka, W. Assunção, G. Halverson, L. Sanchez and D. Menge for their assistance, as well as the Menge Laboratory. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Government sponsorship acknowledged. Support was provided by the ECOSTRESS mission (S.S.C. and J.B.F.) and by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science grant no. 80NSSC20K0216 (G.R.G.).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
All authors performed the literature review. J.B.F. first conceptualized the study. All authors contributed to designing the methodology. S.S.C. conducted all data analysis, performed all statistical tests and generated the figures. All authors wrote and edited the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Plants thanks Andrew Feldman, Alienor Lavergne and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Discussion Sections 1–9, Tables 1–6, Figs. 1–4 and references.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cooley, S.S., Fisher, J.B. & Goldsmith, G.R. Convergence in water use efficiency within plant functional types across contrasting climates. Nat. Plants 8, 341–345 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01131-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-022-01131-z
- Springer Nature Limited
This article is cited by
-
Seasonal variations of leaf ecophysiological traits and strategies of co-occurring evergreen and deciduous trees in white oak forest in the central Himalaya
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (2024)
-
Effects of thinning and understory removal on water use efficiency of Pinus massoniana: evidence from photosynthetic capacity and stable carbon isotope analyses
Journal of Forestry Research (2024)
-
Relations between root anatomical traits and leaf resource-use efficiency in alpine meadows of the Tibetan Plateau
Plant and Soil (2024)
-
Temporal dynamics of ecosystem, inherent, and underlying water use efficiencies of forests, grasslands, and croplands and their responses to climate change
Carbon Balance and Management (2023)
-
Rising water-use efficiency in European grasslands is driven by increased primary production
Communications Earth & Environment (2023)