Any home gardener knows they have to tailor their watering regime for different plants.
Any home gardener knows they have to tailor their watering regime for different plants. Forgetting to water their flowerbed over the weekend could spell disaster, but the trees will likely be fine. Plants have evolved different strategies to manage their water use, but soil moisture models have mostly neglected this until now.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and San Diego State University sought a way to move beyond simple on/off models to capture the nuanced ways that plants manage water stress. To this end, they developed a nonlinear model that can observe these behaviors in satellite data. Their methodology, published in Geophysical Research Letters, will improve climate models and inform our own water management strategies.
“We found that plants don't respond to water stress in a simple, straight-line way,” said senior author Kelly Caylor, a professor at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “Instead, they have dynamic response patterns that reveal whether they're ‘water spenders’ or ‘water savers.’”
Read more at: University of California - Santa Barbara
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