Evaluating Carlquist’s Law from a physiological perspective

What is it about?

In 1984, wood anatomist Sherwin Carlquist found a striking pattern in the wood of flowering plants, where the arrangement of the water transport cells was linked to the types of cells in which they were embedded. Here we examine Carlquists’s observation, outline what still needs to be quantified and discuss the potential implications of Carlquist’s observations for how we understand plant water transport, with a focus on failure of the plant water transport system under drought conditions.

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