8 June, 2019 (Hartmann, NPH, Mortality)

Hartmann, H., Moura, C.F., Anderegg, W.R.L., Ruehr, N.K., Salmon, Y., Allen, C.D., Arndt, S.K., Breshears, D.D., Davi, H. and Galbraith, D. (2018). Research frontiers for improving our understanding of drought-induced tree and forest mortality. New Phytologist, 218(1), 15-28.

This paper suggests some research frontiers (questions) about plant responses to drought. But, rather than the suggestions, I was interested in the topic of Box 1: definition of death for plants. Plants are different to animals, physiologically. Plants lack the nervous system, can easily resprout from a organ, and maintain their lifes with only a few parts of them. These features make a complex issue in defining the death of plant, and this propagates to a hardness in understanding and predicting plant motality.

Another one I want to point out is that it would better to cite the paper by Xu et al. (2016) when the authors argues a need for incorporating plant hydraulic schemes to DGVMs. This is because it is a well-structured paper and it used a novel approach of representing the plant hydraulics so that the ED model can consider the scheme of every PFTs it contains.