5 May, 2019 (Xu, NPH, ED-Hydro)

Xu, X., Medvigy, D., Powers, J.S., Becknell, J.M. and Guan, K. (2016). Diversity in plant hydraulic traits explains seasonal and inter‐annual variations of vegetation dynamics in seasonally dry tropical forests. New Phytologist 212(1), 80-95.

This paper incoporated hydraulic module into the ED2. This module accounted for hydraulic traits such as tugor loss point (TLP), saturated xylem conductivity, 50% xylem conductivity loss water potential, and area-based A~net~ under sufficient water supply. These traits were estimated using a meta analysis in which relationships between the traits and wood density (WD) or SLA were retrieved. Also, four new PFTs, which were classified based on the SLA-WD space, were introduced to the model. And then finally some simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of adding the new module and PFTs by comparing with in-situ observation and MODIS data.

The approach the hydraulic module used was attractive. The hydraulic traits of each PFT could be naturally and separately considered. This consideration will improve simulations for carbon and water and especially ones under drought condition. Also, it was interesting that the model could show the contribution of night time transpiration to restoration of tree water storage. On the other hand, the relationships between the four traits and WD or SLA seem to need improvement. This improvement may improve the model performance. In addition, by comparing the models before and after incoporating the improvement, the contribution of the relationship to the simulation will be quantified and some meaningful functions of the traits to ecosystem may be drawn.