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Water use in an arid gradient
Project Type
Sampled 2024 with more to come. Supported by the Utah Agriculture Experiment Station, the Institute for Land Water and Air, a USU Research Seed Grant, and USDA NIFA.
Related Publications
Kulmatiski, A. Water matching: An explanation for plant growth and coexistence in water-limited systems. In revision. Discover soil.
Kulmatiski, A. and Beard, K.H., 2022. A modern two‐layer hypothesis helps resolve the ‘savanna problem’. Ecology Letters, 25(9), pp.1952-1960.
Kulmatiski, A., Adler, P.B. and Foley, K.M., 2020. Hydrologic niches explain species coexistence and abundance in a shrub–steppe system. Journal of Ecology, 108(3), pp.998-1008.
Kulmatiski, A., P.B. Adler, J.M. Stark, and A.T. Tredennick. 2017. Water and nitrogen uptake are better associated with resource availability than root biomass. Ecosphere. 8(3): e01738.
Rasmussen, C.R. and Kulmatiski, A., 2021. Improving Inferences from Hydrological Isotope Techniques. Trends in Plant Science 26(3), 206-209.
Kulmatiski, A., Beard, K.H., Holdrege, M.C*. and February, E.C., Small differences in root distributions allow resource niche partitioning. Ecology and Evolution, 10(18), pp.9776-9787.
Kulmatiski, A., Holdrege, M.C.*, Chirvasa, C*., Beard, K.H. Root distributions predict shrub-steppe responses to precipitation intensity. Biogeochemistry Discussions.
Ecologists have long understood that water uptake is likely to be critical to understanding plant growth in water limited ecosystems. For the past 100 years, we have relied on root biomass and images to infer water uptake. Tracer injection experiments are providing an unprecedented view into water uptake.
By injecting labeled water into the soil, we can figure out where different plant species have active plant roots.
However, even active roots can not absorb water from dry soils, so we use soil water flow models to estimate how much water different roots absorb over time.
We can use this information to estimate how much water different species will absorb at different locations on the landscape or under different climate conditions.
