Plant hydraulics is crucial for assessing the plants' capacity to extract and transport water from the soil up to their aerial organs. Along with their capacity to exchange water between plant compartments and regulate evaporation, hydraulic properties determine plant water relations, water status and susceptibility to pathogen attacks. Consequently, any variation in the hydraulic characteristics of plants is likely to significantly impact various mechanisms and processes related to plant growth, survival and production, as well as the risk of biotic attacks and forest fire behaviour. However, the integration of hydraulic traits into disciplines such as plant pathology, entomology, fire ecology or agriculture can be significantly improved. This review examines how plant hydraulics can provide new insights into our understanding of these processes, including modelling processes of vegetation dynamics, illuminating numerous perspectives for assessing the consequences of climate change on forest and agronomic systems, and addressing unanswered questions across multiple areas of knowledge.

This article is an output of the international network ‘PsiHub’ funded and supported by the ECODIV department of INRAE.This review was partly supported by the H2020 Project FORGENIUS (Improving access to FORest GENetic resourcesInformation and services for end-USers) #862221

16 páginas.- 5 figuras.- 179 referencias.- Additional Supporting Information may be found online in theSupporting Information section at the end of the article.

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