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A large proportion of rainfall in dryland ecosystems is intercepted by plant foliage and is generally assumed to evaporate to the atmosphere or drip onto the soil surface without being absorbed. We demonstrate foliar absorption of intercepted rainfall in a widely distributed, continental dryland, woody-plant genus: Juniperus. We observed substantial improvement in plant water status, exceeding 1.0 MPa water potential for drought-stressed plants, following precipitation on an experimental plot that excluded soil water infiltration. Experiments that wetted shoots with unlabeled and with isotopically labeled water confirmed that water potential responded substantially to foliar wetting, that these responses were not...
Increasing demands on arid and semiarid ecosystems, which comprise one-third of Earth's terrestrial environment, create an urgent need to understand their biodiversity, function, and mechanisms of change. Sagebrush (Artemisia) steppe, the largest semiarid vegetation type in North America, is endangered because of losses to agriculture, excessive grazing, and invasive species. Establishment in 1950 of what is now designated as the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (southeastern Idaho, USA) created the largest existing reserve of this extensive vegetation type. We used cover, density, and frequency data for vascular plants sampled on 79 permanent plots nine times during 45 years to (1) assess...
Longterm (45 years) temporal data were used to assess the influence of spatial scale on temporal patterns of a semi-arid west Texas grassland. Temporal basal area dynamics of common curlymesquite (Hilaria belangeri (Steud.) Nash) collected from permanent plots within two areas that were released from disturbance (longterm overgrazing and drought), were evaluated at two spatial scales (quadrat, site). Wiens (1989) proposed hypotheses to characterize the influence of scale on variability, predictability, and equilibrium. These hypotheses were tested for this grassland and temporal patterns observed were different for each spatial scale. The large scale (site) was characterized by low variation between units, high...