Assessing the agreement between the pneumatic and the flow‐centrifuge method for estimating xylem safety in temperate diffuse‐porous tree species

S. S. Paligi, R. M. Link*, E. Isasa, P. Bittencourt, J. S. Cabral, S. Jansen, R. S. Oliveira, L. Pereira, B. Schuldt*

*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

The increasing frequency of global change‐type droughts has created a need for fast, accurate and widely applicable techniques for estimating xylem embolism resistance to improve forecasts of future forest changes. We used data from 12 diffuse‐porous temperate tree species covering a wide range of xylem safety to compare the pneumatic and flow‐centrifuge method, two rapid methods used for constructing xylem vulnerability curves. We evaluated the agreement between parameters estimated with both methods and the sensitivity of pneumatic measurements to the duration of air discharge (AD) measurements. There was close agreement between xylem water potentials at 50% air discharged (PAD), estimated with the Pneumatron, and 50% loss of hydraulic conductivity (PLC), estimated with the flow‐centrifuge method (mean signed deviation: 0.12 MPa, Pearson correlation: 0.96 after 15 s of gas extraction). However, the relationship between the estimated slopes was more variable, resulting in lower agreement in the xylem water potential at 12% and 88% PAD/PLC. The agreement between the two methods was not affected by species‐specific vessel length distributions. All pneumatic parameters were sensitive to AD time. Overall agreement was highest at relatively short AD times, with an optimum at 16 s. Our results highlight the value of the Pneumatron as an easy and reliable tool to estimate 50% embolism thresholds for a wide range of diffuse‐porous temperate angiosperms. Further, our study provides a set of useful metrics for methodological comparisons of vulnerability curves in terms of systematic and random deviations, as well as overall agreement.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages15
JournalPlant Biology
Early online date13 Sept 2023
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 13 Sept 2023

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements:
We thank Klaus Körber and Andreas Lösch from the Bavarian State Institute for Viticulture and Horticulture (Bayerische Landesanstalt für Wein- und Gartenbau, LWG) for granting access to their research facility at Stutel, and Xinyi Guan for her support with the automated pneumatic measurements. P.R.L.B. acknowledges the Royal Society's Newton International for a Fellowship (NF170370). R.S.O acknowledges CNPq for a productivity grant. S.J. acknowledges funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG, project nr. 457287575). We wish to thank Brendan Choat, Andrew Davis, Laurent Lamarque and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on the manuscript. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Keywords

  • flow‐centrifuge
  • xylem embolism resistance
  • Pneumatron
  • Drought tolerance traits
  • transport
  • vulnerability curve
  • method comparison
  • plant pneumatics

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