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      Climate determines vascular traits in the ecologically diverse genus Eucalyptus.

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          Abstract

          Current theory presumes that natural selection on vascular traits is controlled by a trade-off between efficiency and safety of hydraulic architecture. Hence, traits linked to efficiency, such as vessel diameter, should show biogeographic patterns; but critical tests of these predictions are rare, largely owing to confounding effects of environment, tree size and phylogeny. Using wood sampled from a phylogenetically constrained set of 28 Eucalyptus species, collected from a wide gradient of aridity across Australia, we show that hydraulic architecture reflects adaptive radiation of this genus in response to variation in climate. With increasing aridity, vessel diameters narrow, their frequency increases with a distribution that becomes gradually positively skewed and sapwood density increases while the theoretical hydraulic conductivity declines. Differences in these hydraulic traits appear largely genotypic in origin rather than environmentally plastic. Data reported here reflect long-term adaptation of hydraulic architecture to water availability. Rapidly changing climates, on the other hand, present significant challenges to the ability of eucalypts to adapt their vasculature.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Ecol. Lett.
          Ecology letters
          1461-0248
          1461-023X
          Mar 2016
          : 19
          : 3
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW, 2751, Australia.
          [2 ] Faculty of Agriculture and Environment, University of Sydney, 1 Central Avenue, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015, Australia.
          [3 ] CSIRO Land and Water Flagship, Floreat, WA, 6014, Australia.
          [4 ] Department of Forest Resources, College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, 55108, USA.
          Article
          10.1111/ele.12559
          26743135
          99e67df9-424b-48b4-918c-a507f1b971a2
          © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/CNRS.
          History

          Anatomy,angiosperm tree,aridity,conduit diameter,hydraulic conductivity,vessel frequency distribution,water availability,wood density,xylem

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