Biology subjects

Konings, A. G.

Publications and source records attributed to Konings, A. G..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

The PSInet Plant Water Potential Database: advancing new perspectives on plant water status, traits, and hydraulic processes

Water potential gradients drive water flow within and between soils and plants, and the internal plant water potential controls a wide range of physiological processes including photosynthesis, growth, and mortality. Notwithstanding this clear relevance for many critical aspects of ecosystem function, water potential data have historically been relatively inaccessible and unnetworked. The absence of a centralized repository for plant water potential time series limits our ability to integrate a wealth of ecophysiological information from other networks and from remote sensing. Closing this gap is necessary to address unresolved questions about plant responses to drought and heat stress, and to make confident predictions about plant and ecosystem function in a warming world. Here, we introduce the PSInet database -- a global collection of plant water potential time series from 285 datasets representing 523 species. We present the workflow that guided database development and evaluate its key features. Through a series of preliminary analyses, we then highlight the potential of the PSInet database for applications including: a) advancing plant water use strategy frameworks; b) disentangling the impacts of soil versus atmospheric drought stress; c) assessing the long-held assumption of pre-dawn equilibration of ecosystem water potential; d) understanding the risk of drought-driven mortality; and e) benchmarking remote-sensing data products and land-surface models.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2026

Water availability has stronger effects on West Nile virus dynamics in water-limited regions

West Nile virus dynamics are shaped by hydrological conditions that influence mosquito habitat and pathogen transmission, but identifying causal relationships is difficult in managed landscapes where irrigation decouples local water conditions from precipitation, complicating climate-disease inference. We address this challenge using a 21-year panel of more than 19 million Culex tarsalis mosquitoes from Californias Central Valley, applying fixed-effects panel models to estimate how surface water availability affects mosquito abundance and infection rates while accounting for spatial differences and shared temporal variation. We find that wetter conditions lead to higher mosquito abundance but slightly lower infection rates, suggesting divergent responses of vector population growth and pathogen amplification. These patterns are consistent across multiple hydrological measures, including drought indices, soil moisture, surface water, and evapotranspiration. Effects are strongest in water-limited regions, where hydrological variability is greatest and buffering by snowmelt-fed river systems is weakest. Overall, hydrological conditions exert contrasting effects on key components of West Nile virus dynamics, and these relationships are strongly conditioned by human water management. Our results highlight how irrigation decouples local hydrological conditions from broader climatic variability, underscoring the need for fine-scale hydrological data and panel-based approaches to identify drivers of disease dynamics in human managed landscapes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2021

Global distribution of the rooting zone water storage capacity reflects plant adaptation to the environment

The rooting zone water storage capacity (S0) extends from the soil surface to the weathered bedrock (the Critical Zone) and determines land-atmosphere exchange during dry periods. Despite its importance to land-surface modeling, variations of S0 across space are largely unknown as they cannot be observed directly. We developed a method to diagnose global variations of S0 from the relationship between vegetation activity (measured by sun-induced fluorescence and by the evaporative fraction) and the cumulative water deficit (CWD). We then show that spatial variations in S0 can be predicted from the assumption that plants are adapted to sustain CWD extremes occurring with a return period that is related to the life form of dominant plants and the large-scale topographical setting. Predicted biome-level S0 distributions, translated to an apparent rooting depth (zr) by accounting for soil texture, are consistent with observations from a comprehensive zr dataset. Large spatial variations in S0 across the globe reflect adaptation of zr to the hydroclimate and topography and implies large heterogeneity in the sensitivity of vegetation activity to drought. The magnitude of S0 inferred for most of the Earths vegetated regions and particularly for those with a large seasonality in their hydroclimate indicates an important role for plant access to water stored at depth - beyond the soil layers commonly considered in land-surface models.

ecology↗