Whole‐tree mesophyll conductance reconciles isotopic and gas‐exchange estimates of water‐use efficiency

What is it about?

To remove carbon from the atmosphere, plants need to spend water. Water use efficiency (WUE) describes the ratio between these processes, carbon uptake and water lost. WUE can be obtained by measuring gas-exchange between plants and the atmosphere of by measuring certain chemical properties of the plant material. We estimated WUE with the two methodologies and found that there was disagreement due to processes occurring at the leaf level. We suggest incorporating these processes when comparing WUE estimates to better predict vegetation-climatic feedbacks.

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