This roundtable gathers experts on plant water availability from multiple domains, and crosses their perspectives, in order to delineate future avenues of research on plant water limitation.
The supply of water from the soil-root system to the leaf involves a continuous transfer across multiple media with dynamic permeabilities and geometries.
Yet, each of the concerned scientific domains tends to focus on a single media as indicator of plant water limitation, with little overlap across disciplines:
- Field and ecosystem scale models typically combine macroscopic water limitation factors, such as soil moisture and root exploration functions.
- Soil physicists rely on microscopic functions of water depletion around roots to explain water limitation.
- Root physiologists focus on root transmembrane water channel abundance, and stem physiologists on the transport capacity of plant vascular system.
While these approaches involve different processes and scales, they are nonetheless not exclusive. Moreover, mathematical approaches on emergent properties of complex hydraulic systems have opened the way to simple trans-disciplinary approaches to plant water limitation.
This Splinter meeting constitutes an open door for such a trans-disciplinary cross-talk.