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Abstract. Plant transpiration downregulation in the presence of soil water stress is a critical mechanism for predicting global water, carbon, and energy cycles. Currently, many terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs) represent this mechanism with an empirical correction function (β) of soil moisture – a convenient approach that can produce large prediction uncertainties. To reduce this uncertainty, TBMs have increasingly incorporated physically based plant hydraulic models (PHMs). However, PHMs introduce additional parameter uncertainty and computational demands. Therefore, understanding why and when PHM and β predictions diverge would usefully inform model selection within TBMs. Here, we use a minimalist PHM to demonstrate that coupling the effects of soil water stress and atmospheric moisture demand leads to a spectrum of transpiration responses controlled by soil–plant hydraulic transport (conductance). Within this transport-limitation spectrum, β emerges as an end-member scenario of PHMs with infinite conductance, completely decoupling the effects of soil water stress and atmospheric moisture demand on transpiration. As a result, PHM and β transpiration predictions diverge most for soil–plant systems with low hydraulic conductance (transport-limited) that experience high variation in atmospheric moisture demand and have moderate soil moisture supply for plants. We test these minimalist model results by using a land surface model at an AmeriFlux site. At this transport-limited site, a PHM downregulation scheme outperforms the β scheme due to its sensitivity to variations in atmospheric moisture demand. Based on this observation, we develop a new “dynamic β” that varies with atmospheric moisture demand – an approach that overcomes existing biases within β schemes and has potential to simplify existing PHM parameterization and implementation.
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This content will become publicly available on April 1, 2026
A Unified Framework to Reconcile Different Approaches of Modeling Transpiration Response to Water Stress: Plant Hydraulics, Supply Demand Balance, and Empirical Soil Water Stress Function
Abstract Plant responses to water stress is a major uncertainty to predicting terrestrial ecosystem sensitivity to drought. Different approaches have been developed to represent plant water stress. Empirical approaches (the empirical soil water stress (or Beta) function and the supply‐demand balance scheme) have been widely used for many decades; more mechanistic based approaches, that is, plant hydraulic models (PHMs), were increasingly adopted in the past decade. However, the relationships between them—and their underlying connections to physical processes—are not sufficiently understood. This limited understanding hinders informed decisions on the necessary complexities needed for different applications, with empirical approaches being mechanistically insufficient, and PHMs often being too complex to constrain. Here we introduce a unified framework for modeling transpiration responses to water stress, within which we demonstrate that empirical approaches are special cases of the full PHM, when the plant hydraulic parameters satisfy certain conditions. We further evaluate their response differences and identify the associated physical processes. Finally, we propose a methodology for assessing the necessity of added complexities of the PHM under various climatic conditions and ecosystem types, with case studies in three typical ecosystems: a humid Midwestern cropland, a semi‐arid evergreen needleleaf forest, and an arid grassland. Notably, Beta function overestimates transpiration when VPD is high due to its lack of constraints from hydraulic transport and is therefore insufficient in high VPD environments. With the unified framework, we envision researchers can better understand the mechanistic bases of and the relationships between different approaches and make more informed choices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1847334
- PAR ID:
- 10616197
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Geophysical Union (AGU) and John Wiley & Sons, Inc
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1942-2466
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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