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

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 angiosperms, drought-related mortality risk is associated with lower resistance (low capacity to reduce impact of the initial drought), while it is related to reduced recovery (low capacity to attain pre-drought growth rates) in gymnosperms. The different resilience strategies in these two taxonomic groups open new avenues to improve our understanding and prediction of drought-induced mortality.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	DeSoto, Lucía, Cailleret, Maxime, Sterck, Frank, Jansen, S., Kramer, K., Robert, E. M. R., Aakala, T., Amoroso, Mariano, Bigler, C., Camarero, Jesús Julio, Cufar, Katarina, Gea Izquierdo, Guillermo, Gillner, S., Haavik, L. J., Hereş, Ana-María, Kane, J. M., Kharuk, V. I., Kitzberger, Thomas, Klein, T., Levanic, T., Linares, Juan Carlos, Mäkinen, H., Oberhuber, W., Papadopoulos, A., Rohner, B., Sangüesa-Barreda, G., Stojanovic, Dejan, Suárez, Maria Laura, Villalba, Ricardo, Martínez-Vilalta, Jordi
Other Authors:	European Commission
Format:	artículo biblioteca
Language:	English
Published:	Nature Publishing Group 2020-01-28
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10261/337498 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002341 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100006959 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100006280 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001871 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000780 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003329 https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85078481366
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