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Drought extent and severity have increased and are predicted to continue to increase in many parts of the world. Understanding tree vulnerability to drought at both individual and species levels is key to ongoing forest management and preparation for future transitions in community composition. The influence of subsurface hydrologic processes is particularly important in water‐limited ecosystems, and is an under‐studied aspect of tree drought vulnerability. With California's 2013–2016 extraordinary drought as a natural experiment, we studied four co‐occurring woodland tree species, blue oak (Quercus douglasii), valley oak (Quercus lobata), gray pine (Pinus sabiniana), and California juniper (Juniperus californica), examining drought vulnerability as a function of climate, lithology and hydrology using regional aerial dieback surveys and site‐scale field surveys. We found that in addition to climatic drought severity (i.e., rainfall), subsurface processes explained variation in drought vulnerability within and across species at both scales. Regionally for blue oak, severity of dieback was related to the bedrock lithology, with higher mortality on igneous and metamorphic substrates, and to regional reductions in groundwater. At the site scale, access to deep subsurface water, evidenced by stem water stable isotope composition, was related to canopy condition across all species. Along hillslope gradients, channel locations supported similar environments in terms of water stress across a wide climatic gradient, indicating that subsurface hydrology mediates species’ experience of drought, and that areas associated with persistent access to subsurface hydrologic resources may provide important refugia at species’ xeric range edges. Despite this persistent overall influence of the subsurface environment, individual species showed markedly different response patterns. We argue that hydrologic niche segregation can be a useful lens through which to interpret these differences in vulnerability to climatic drought and climate change.

Climate, physical landscapes, and biota interact to generate heterogeneous hydrologic conditions in space and over time, which are reflected in spatial patterns of species distributions. As these species distributions respond to rapid climate change, microrefugia may support local species persistence in the face of deteriorating climatic suitability. Recent focus on temperature as a determinant of microrefugia insufficiently accounts for the importance of hydrologic processes and changing water availability with changing climate. Where water scarcity is a major limitation now or under future climates,hydrologic microrefugiaare likely to prove essential for species persistence, particularly for sessile species and plants. Zones of high relative water availability – mesic microenvironments – are generated by a wide array of hydrologic processes, and may be loosely coupled to climatic processes and therefore buffered from climate change. Here, we review the mechanisms that generate mesic microenvironments and their likely robustness in the face of climate change. We argue that mesic microenvironments will act as species‐specific refugia only if the nature and space/time variability in water availability are compatible with the ecological requirements of a target species. We illustrate this argument with case studies drawn from California oak woodland ecosystems. We posit that identification of hydrologic refugia could form a cornerstone of climate‐cognizant conservation strategies, but that this would require improved understanding of climate change effects on key hydrologic processes, including frequently cryptic processes such as groundwater flow.